Planning Commission Member Abhijit Sen said in a recent interview why he thought universalisation was still a good idea to make public distribution system (PDS) work. He cited examples of Chattisgarh and Odisha — how PDS started working rather soundly in these two states after a long period of dysfunction when the price of rice was brought down to Rs 2 per kg. It generated demand, and the supplier could not afford to divert food grains any more. He feels universalisation would have the same effect.
Tamil Nadu and Kerala have indeed made PDS a success through universalisation. In Tamil Nadu, 1.5 crore ‘green’ cardholders get rice at Rs 2 a kg, while there are those who have chosen to have sugar in place of rice. They are the ‘white card’ holders and are 7.83 lakh in number. Kerala gives rice at Rs 2 to all cardholders, with quantities varying for below poverty line (BPL) and above poverty line.
It is the Chattisgarh government under chief minister Raman Singh which has underlined for all states the importance of PDS — not only in terms of the electoral gains, but gains for the people of the state.
Singh reformed PDS in several stages and replaced the private businesses with village-based societies to run the shops. The number of ration cards eligible for Rs 2 rice doubled from 35 per cent.
Rajasthan, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh followed suit with rice at Rs 2 a kg. Bihar where 90 per cent of rice is diverted from PDS, reforms are on their way. A study by Reetika Khera and fellow researchers found a dramatic improvement in PDS in several states this year, debunking the theory that PDS just doesn’t work. “In Odisha and Uttar Pradesh — states notorious for corruption — leakages came down from a whopping 76 per cent to 50 per cent and from 58 per cent to 27 per cent, respectively,” Khera says.
However, the fixation with targeting beneficiaries for subsidies is difficult to shed for a government after two decades. So, it is back to doing a headcount of people who belong to the BPL category.
Activists of Right to Food tracking the ongoing census in Rajasthan and Odisha found the following: BPL lives in a one room house — six-feet long, four-feet wide and tall enough for a person to stand! And, the additional challenge is if he is a fisherman, he won’t have any motorised equipment, even if staying alive today for a fisherman means a motorised boat in the heavily trawled waters. He should not buy a two-wheeler, though second-hand ones are available cheap. If he is a farmer, he should have no pump sets. Although a woman-headed house gets a BPL tag, she is eligible if she does not have a 16-year-old son. The BPL son, according to government calculations, would quit education and support the family.
Again, BPL should not live in brick houses, even if they are cemented with mud. If a disabled man heads the house, he is termed BPL, but if his wife can run the house, he is not BPL. If he is a landless labourer, he is BPL, but if he has half a bigha of land or he is a weaver, then he is not.
In other words, the definition of poverty goes much below an expenditure capacity of Rs 32 a day. These results are derived when exclusion and inclusion criteria are applied on households and they are ranked on a scale of zero to seven. The study found data entry operators from private institutes entering census data in English into laptops, and thus, keeping the process totally non-transparent. Even the colonial powers would have done better.
