The Great Divide

The facts first, unearthed by a Parliamentary Committee : between 1997 and 2007, 1.83 lakh tonnes of wheat, 6.33 lakh tonnes of rice, 2.20 lakh tonnes of paddy and 111 lakh tonnes of maize rotted due to either lack of storage facilities or poor maintenance of stocks in the existing facilities. As on January 1, 2010, 10,688 lakh tonnes of foodgrains were found damaged in the depots of the Food Corporation of India, enough to feed over six lakh people for over 10 years. The storage losses of foodgrains in 2009-10 amounted to Rs 228.39 crore and transit losses another Rs 182.46 crore.

Let us look at another set of statistics. The Arjun Sengupta Committee Report in 2007-08 pointed out that while 235 million people are able to take care of themselves, an unbelievable 836 million people still remain marginalised. The National Sample Survey (NSS) data has divided the poor into four groups : 

The extremely poor : average per capita consumption income is Rs 9 per day; 

Those above the poverty line : Rs 12 per day; 

The marginally poor : Rs 15 per day; 

The vulnerable :  above Rs 15 but less than Rs 20 per day; 

Can we, the urbane middle class imagine a family of four or more living on less than Rs 20 per day? Incidentally, the middle income group earns Rs 37 per day and those in the high income bracket earns above Rs 93 per day. In short, the Arjun Sengupta report tells us that 79% of Indians are poor. Let us not forget that the NSS data is based on measuring expenditure and then using it as proxy income, which I personally feel, is the correct way to measure poverty at such a marginal level. 

However, there are divergent views and one cannot ignore the logic behind a different scale for measurement of poverty which assumes that people are earning much more than what is revealed by expenditure alone. Fair enough. Let us then consider a new dimension that has been added by Rajesh Shukla, director of the Centre for Macro-Consumer Research under the aegis of the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER). His recent book, ‘How India Earns, Spends and Saves’ reveals new data at variance with conventional thinking. According to him, 45% of Indians earn less than Rs 20 per day. Great. That means we are less poor than what we thought we were.

Then there is the Government accepted Tendulkar Committee Report that has  estimated poverty figures at 37.2%. While being much higher than the 27% estimated by Centre, Tendulkar's figure is closer to what the states have been claiming. 

Finally, there is the issue of a suggested pilot project to estimate the poor according to recommendations of the N.C.Saxena Committee Report. The pilot project, if taken up, will test the methodology suggested by Saxena. The villain of the piece is Centre's estimation of poverty based on extrapolating sample survey and the BPL census which is based on a door-to-door identification. The key flaw in the NSS survey exercise is that rigid uniformity ignores local concerns which vary from state to state. The questions have to be relevant for socially diverse regions with extremely backward and tribal populations while there is an issue of state-specific minorities against nationally designated ones. The two give divergent results with the Centre sticking with the statistical estimates. Saxena has suggested a method to reconcile the two exercises. The pilot study will test out the efficacy of Saxena's methodology and suggest fine tuning.

The fact of the matter is that we do not know how poor we are, even after sixty years of planning for poverty eradication. Government after Government has set up several committees to figure out how to plan for the poor, both rural and urban. No wonder the Prime Minister is uncomfortable with the Apex Court's directive to distribute the rotting food grain free to the poor as the Government does not even know to whom should they distribute this to! Again, if CITU had those figures, they probably would not have dared to call the nationwide strike they did yesterday. Their constituency is the the organised labour, who are a small minority. It is the millions of unorganised and marginal labour who went without enough food yesterday due to the strike which would surely reflect as an additional anti incumbency factor for the ruling combine in Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. Even INTUC does not seem to realise the effect of supporting a strike at this juncture due to lack of awareness about the extent of need for daily subsistence. 

Now comes the news that the food security bill may be set for a radical overhaul. I guess that is welcome - it can't be worse than the early attempts at drafting one. Take for instance the meeting of the Empowered Group of Ministers held in February. They were to "discuss the enactment of the proposed National Food Security Bill." The first thing the EGoM came up with was this gem. 2.1 (a) "The definition of Food Security should be limited to the specific issue of foodgrains (wheat and rice) and be delinked from the larger issue of nutritional security". Food security delinked from nutritional security? Note that the same line concedes nutritional security is "the larger issue." 


Why then the need to delink the two? Is 35 kg of rice at Rs.3 a kilo (for a section of the population) food security? Are there no other determinants of food security? Like health, nutrition, livelihoods, jobs, food prices? Can we even delink the fuel price hike from discussions on food security? Or from the wilful gutting of the public distribution system? Or from the havoc wrought by the ever-growing futures trade in wheat, pulses, edible oils and more? The truth is the government seeks ways to spend less and less on the very food security it talks about. Hence the endless search for a lower BPL figure. To the government's great dismay, all three officially-constituted committees have turned up estimates of poverty higher than its own.

Hunger is defined not by how many people suffer it, but by how many the Government is willing to pay for. That is the bottomline, really.