Right to food gives chance to focus on farm reform
20 DEC, 2011, 05.10AM IST, ET BUREAU
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On Sunday, long after media had written reams about policy paralysis, India's Cabinet cleared a law that will supply cheap foodgrains to millions of the poor. This is probably the most politically savvy step taken by a government that's been buffeted around for nearly two years by charges of graft and inaction.
Critics of the right to food law will find many things wrong with it: that it'll be too costly, it might be implemented by the inept and venal Food Corporation of India, that it's better to give cash to the poor rather than grain that they might not want, anyway.
Of course, it'll take time to hammer out a good system to run the world's largest food subsidy and delivery programme, but the only way to learn how to do that will be by doing it, not sitting around in committees and talking about numbers and projections.
After all, when the first UPA government came up with the NREGS programme to guarantee poor Indians the right to work for wages, criticism was sharp and the project was supposed to be doomed from the beginning. Six years later, opposition to the scheme is muted and many acknowledge that despite flaws and loopholes, NREGS has succeeded in putting a floor under rural wage rates.
So far this fiscal, which will end in March, the programme has given 33.1 million man hours of work to poor households. A little more than half of its beneficiaries are women. Agriculture minister Sharad Pawar worries about this: he recently said that the NREGS should be suspended for three months when harvesting is done, to keep labour costs low for big farmers who hire wage workers.
Yet, Pawar's worry only highlights the importance of the NREGS and efforts of many state governments, to enforce minimum wages for workers in villages. If you believe anecdotal evidence, the seasonal flow of people moving from poor states to better off ones in search of daily wage work has slowed.
This is a worry for people in states like Punjab and Maharashtra, who depended on this vast, peripatetic army of workers as a reliable source of very cheap labour, but higher or more stable wages mean that overall standards of living are going up across the country.
What is the food bill expected to achieve? Its first objective is clearly political. It will be hard for any political party to argue against a law which says that its only aim is providing cheap food to the poor. The fact that Congress president Sonia Gandhi prodded the Cabinet, which was dawdling on the bill, to clear it on a Sunday shows that she hasn't lost sight of the aam aadmi objectives which brought two Congress-led coalitions to power in 2004 and 2009.
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On Sunday, long after media had written reams about policy paralysis, India's Cabinet cleared a law that will supply cheap foodgrains to millions of the poor. This is probably the most politically savvy step taken by a government that's been buffeted around for nearly two years by charges of graft and inaction.
Critics of the right to food law will find many things wrong with it: that it'll be too costly, it might be implemented by the inept and venal Food Corporation of India, that it's better to give cash to the poor rather than grain that they might not want, anyway.
Of course, it'll take time to hammer out a good system to run the world's largest food subsidy and delivery programme, but the only way to learn how to do that will be by doing it, not sitting around in committees and talking about numbers and projections.
After all, when the first UPA government came up with the NREGS programme to guarantee poor Indians the right to work for wages, criticism was sharp and the project was supposed to be doomed from the beginning. Six years later, opposition to the scheme is muted and many acknowledge that despite flaws and loopholes, NREGS has succeeded in putting a floor under rural wage rates.
So far this fiscal, which will end in March, the programme has given 33.1 million man hours of work to poor households. A little more than half of its beneficiaries are women. Agriculture minister Sharad Pawar worries about this: he recently said that the NREGS should be suspended for three months when harvesting is done, to keep labour costs low for big farmers who hire wage workers.
Yet, Pawar's worry only highlights the importance of the NREGS and efforts of many state governments, to enforce minimum wages for workers in villages. If you believe anecdotal evidence, the seasonal flow of people moving from poor states to better off ones in search of daily wage work has slowed.
This is a worry for people in states like Punjab and Maharashtra, who depended on this vast, peripatetic army of workers as a reliable source of very cheap labour, but higher or more stable wages mean that overall standards of living are going up across the country.
What is the food bill expected to achieve? Its first objective is clearly political. It will be hard for any political party to argue against a law which says that its only aim is providing cheap food to the poor. The fact that Congress president Sonia Gandhi prodded the Cabinet, which was dawdling on the bill, to clear it on a Sunday shows that she hasn't lost sight of the aam aadmi objectives which brought two Congress-led coalitions to power in 2004 and 2009.
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