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THE
NATION: ANTODAYA SCHEME
Against
The Grain
Vajpayee's
birthday gift to the poor raises doubts over the efficacy of PDS in reaching
the target groups
By Lakshmi
Iyer
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| TELLING
DISPARITY: Studies reveal that states in the south like Kerala, Andhra
Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have provided optimal PDS cover to beneficiaries
unlike those in the north |
Does
rice at Rs 3 and wheat at Rs 2 a kg sound like a vintage N.T.
Rama Rao recipe for fiscal disaster? Not if it is a birthday gift from
the prime minister, the Food Ministry officials are most likely to argue.
On his 76th birthday on December 25, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee
launched the Antodaya Anna Yojana-"a food scheme to reach the last
hungry person"-at an extra cost of Rs 1,039 crore to the exchequer.
Under the scheme, the targeted public distribution system (TPDS), as the
PDS has come to be known since 1997, has been more narrowly targeted.
It is aimed at the poorer among the poor.
The 50th
National Sample Survey conducted in 1996-97 estimated that 6.52 crore
people or one crore families from among 32.03 crore people below the poverty
line (BPL) were not only poor but also hungry. That is, they could not
afford foodgrains even at fair price shops. The Government has now deemed
that these people qualified for 25 kg of foodgrains per month-5 kg more
than the rest in the BPL-and at nearly half the price. A week after the
prime minister's announcement, guidelines were issued. Twenty-eight states
and five Union territories were asked to identify beneficiaries and have
Antodaya ration cards issued in two months. Thus, after the APL (above
poverty line) and the BPL was born a new PDS class of Antodaya .
Coming from
a government that has in the past three years cut food subsidies to reduce
budgetary deficit, the largesse certainly seemed an extraordinary step.
What brought about this change of heart? Just a birthday gift from the
prime minister? Far from it. The scheme is on the ruling NDA's national
agenda for governance, points out Union Food Minister Shanta Kumar."Antodaya,"
he justifies, "is there simply because democracy and hunger cannot
go together."
The merit
of Kumar's logic has been challenged by an unlikely group, namely, the
Parliamentary Standing Committee on Food, Civil Supplies and Public Distribution.
Within the committee, it is the NDA members, including those belonging
to the BJP, who harbour doubts about the programme. Last week, the panel
wrote to the Food Ministry seeking details of the scheme. Panel Chairman
Devendra Prasad Yadav wonders if the Planning Commission endorsed the
scheme. The Food Ministry, after all, has no jurisdiction to determine
parameters for such poverty-alleviation programmes. "When I introduced
the TPDS, the Planning Commission had set the ground rules. A report submitted
by an expert group redefined the poverty line. Now the ministry has no
reliable yardstick to measure the poorer among the poor," says the
former food minister.
A product
of its times
The MPs
feel the new scheme was launched by the Food Ministry in a hurry to cover
up its mistakes. For instance, steep hikes in PDS prices in April 2000
had impacted foodgrain offtake. During April-October 2000, offtake of
rice fell from 78 per cent to 45 per cent and that of wheat from 47 per
cent to 30 per cent. The decline compounded the mounting food stock problem.
Some members suspect the scheme has been introduced only to get rid of
an estimated 2,05,520 metric tonnes of damaged foodgrains. "We had
asked them to dump the grains into the sea. And they have come up with
the Antodaya scheme," says a member.
Food Ministry
officials, however, point out that Antodaya is aimed at toning up the
system. The PDS was born in 1939 to manage war-time scarcity, abolished
in 1947, but with the onset of planning, it was reintroduced in 1950 as
a welfare scheme. The officials maintain that Antodaya too is a product
of its times. The scheme, to an extent, is aimed at managing a situation
that the country is not quite used to-surplus grain stock. The stock stands
at 42.25 million tonnes (14.49 million tonnes of rice and 27.6 million
tonnes of wheat) against a prescribed level of 24.30 million tonnes.
Kumar, however,
rejects this raison d'etere of Antodaya."We don't want to empty our
godowns. After all, we are only allotting an extra 6 lakh tonnes of grain
for this scheme," he says. To buttress his claim, he adds that in
the event of food shortage, the Government would even import grains to
meet its commitment.
To the ministry,
the Antodaya scheme has other long-term uses as well. Firstly, the new
target group will remain the core of the PDS. In the past two years, the
PDS beneficiaries under APL have been virtually phased out. In the past
budget, the APL cardholders were priced out of the PDS mechanism as far
as foodgrains were concerned. Early this month, after the Antodaya scheme
was launched, the Government pushed them out of ration-sugar entitlement
too. That one move alone was enough to bring down the subsidy on sugar
from Rs 400 crore to Rs 110 crore annually. In its mid-term appraisal
of the Ninth Five Year Plan, the Planning Commission exhorted the Government
to "completely decontrol sugar and take it out of the PDS" as
the sale of the commodity "draws well-to-do families to the system".
If APL families
were found undeserving of the PDS, next on the chopping block could be
those under the BPL category. A section in the Food Ministry is already
rooting for the phasing out of BPL. In government circles, this argument
is bolstered by a Tata Economic Consultancy Services study that says 36
per cent of wheat supplies, 31 per cent of rice and 23 per cent of sugar
are diverted to the open market. Besides, an ORG-MARG survey of PDS beneficiaries,
commissioned by the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India, found that
in 18 states BPL beneficiaries had not been identified. It also found
that states which had high incidence of poverty did not fully utilise
the PDS. However, Kumar dismisses suggestions that the BPL will be phased
out.
From the
universal PDS to APL/BPL to Antodaya, welfare economist Madhura Swaminathan-who
is a member of the Government's Grain Policy Committee-sees the journey
as a familiar trajectory of events in countries such as Sri Lanka and
Jamaica that dismantled PDS under structural adjustment. "The first
step was to run down the system, narrowly target beneficiaries and then
shut it down," she says. If poverty were to be measured by the food
share-a criterion used in the US Food Stamp Programme-in the expenditure
of the household, 95 per cent of the households would be found poor. If
nutrition were to be the criterion, 60 per cent of the people would be
found malnourished, adds Swaminathan. Yadav sees Antodaya as an attempt
to dilute TPDS. "Remember when the OBCs were being empowered?"
he asks. "People started talking about 'most backward classes' to
dilute the movement. The same is happening to BPL now." Identifying
the poorer among the poor may be a tricky business, but more than that
a narrower PDS target will possibly weaken welfare.
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