Swaminathan urges anti-hunger plan

Eminent agricultural scientist M S Swaminathan said the country needed a National Food Guarantee Scheme (NFGC) that would combine the features of the food for work and the employment guarantee scheme of Maharastra in order to achieve a hunger-free India.

Addressing the media at the sidelines of a seminar on 'Empowerment of rural community through village knowledge centres' in Kolkata on Monday, Swaminathan said NFGC would help to provide food grains to all who due to inadequate livelihood opportunities, were unable to have economic access to food.

"The Food for Work programme should cover skilled work also, so that food becomes a powerful instrument for social and human development," he said. Swaminathan said a 'Food for Nutrition' programme to cover pregnant women, infants and old and infirm persons.

"Food security should not be seen in aggregate terms for a large population but as nutritional security for individuals," he pointed out. M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) had identified a number of 'hot spots' where food security was a major problem.

"There are hunger hot spots, suicide hot spots which see extreme manifestations of farmer distress and hydrologic hot spots where water is a rare commodity. We have compiled secondary data based on this," he said.

Programmes on mass nutrition should be implemented through the panchayati raj network.

The national food security summit in February this year had drawn up a roadmap to achieve relative freedom from malnutrition but it should be complemented with a national food guarantee scheme.