Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the Parliament. Some of the individuals associated with the campaign of civil society
organizations were also involved in the drafting of this legislation.7
The National Food Security Bill commits the government to reach food subsidies
to 75% of the rural population and 50% of urban population. The coverage has been
extended from existing levels to what has been called near-universal coverage. However,
the near-universal coverage has not put an end to the debate about targeting as the gov-
ernment still has the task of excluding 25% of the rural population and 50% of the urban
population..The PDS with its in-kind transfers is seen as the principal instrument of
subsidy delivery in the bill. However, some of the clauses seem to also leave open the
possibility of cash transfers. The run-up to this bill has been contentious as the govern-
ment advisors, media, and the independent experts debated alternatives that can effec-
tively deliver the right to food.
The Food Subsidy Debates
Two issues have been prominent in the debates about the food security legislation. The
first issue is about the scale of the food subsidy program. Should it continue as a tar-
geted program, or should it have universal access? The second issue is about the form of
the subsidy program. Should the subsidy program be modeled on the public distribu-
tion system, or are there alternative and more efficient forms of delivery? In particular,
should cash transfers replace in-kind transfers?
Neither of these issues is unique to the Indian context. Hence, the debate is of wider sig-
nificance and has relevance to the delivery of welfare programs in low-income countries.
Coverage
The massive exclusion errors of PDS targeting, noted in the previous section, question
the continuance of targeted programs. Until a reliable way of identifying the poor is
found, might near-universal coverage be necessary to avoid exclusion errors?
A great deal depends on the specific context of a country. Consider India, for exam-
ple, with 92% of its labor force in the informal sector. Many are self-employed.
Some days they earn some income. Some days they don't. How do we even mea-
sure their incomes? How do we identify the poor? Any process that we use is likely
to leave out many from the list. If we leave the job of identifying the poor to the local
community—presumably because they have local knowledge—we would be leaving
the job to the local elite, who cannot always be trusted to make an objective identifi-
cation of the poor.8
Even if it were possible to identify the poor, clearly the poor are defined as those
under an arbitrarily defined line. In India, the official poverty line is close to $1.25
a day at PPP. In 2005, according to the World Bank calculations, about 41.6% of
 
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