The Right to Food Campaign condemns the government’s attempts to shut down the public distribution system
This week, media reports indicate that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sweepingly intends to encourage states to scrap the public distribution scheme (PDS) system and directly transfer money into bank accounts of poor people. Apparently the PM quoted the success of miniscule pilots conducted in Haryana and Puducherry after they “closed their PDS systems”.
The Right to Food Campaign strongly condemns this centralised decision-making process by the central government and excessive pressure on states based on speculative “alternative facts”.
For one, despite the pilots while Chandigarh has made a complete transition to cash transfers, the rest of Haryana continues to have functional ration shops. In Puducherry too beneficiaries continue to receive both cash and food grains and the PDS has not shutdown for a fact.
Second, these pilot experiments have been far from successful. A comprehensive survey conducted for the government’s own NITI Aayog by Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in 2016 indicated that the pilots have had at best “mixed results”. 50 percent of surveyed beneficiaries received either no or less cash than that they were entitled to in lieu of subsidised foodgrains.
Unsuprisingly, majority of beneficiaries continued to prefer food to cash. Another survey conducted by the Centre for Equity Studies (CES) in 2015 also found that 40 percent of the households in Chandigarh were not receiving the cash entitlement, despite their names being on beneficiary lists.
Third, there have been waves of protests in these union territories against the transition to cash, which has been largely unreported in the national media. In Puducherry, high decibel protests against cash transfers resulted in an earlier 2015 cash pilot being abandoned within 2 months of its launch. Gram panchayats in Dadra and Nagar Haveli, where ration shops are managed by cooperatives and not private dealers, had stalled the rollout of cash transfers and now it has only been partially implemented in urban pockets.
India has half a million fair price shops. The National Food Security Act guarantees two of every three Indians 5 kilos of subsidised foodgrain every month. The highly urbanised union territories, despite their better-than-average conditions of infrastructure and accessibility compared to the rest of rural India,have not yet succeded in implementing cash transfers. Worse, across India there is only 1 bank branch for every 11 ration shops.
With famers already reeling under an agrarian crisis it is also entirely unclear what will happen to India’s 48 million tonne mountain of food stocks, if the PDS were to be replaced with cash nationwide. The Right to Food Campaign condems the excessive pressure on states to dismantle the public distribution system which is a lifeline for 4 of every 5 Indians.