Delivering Food Subsidy - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 321

of affirming the rights of the poor. Although they are deeply distrustful of the state,
the enlargement of subsidies via in-kind transfers expands state powers and interven-
tion to unprecedented levels. Their preferred method for controlling the incentives
for cheating and fraud built into the design of in-kind transfers is an elaborate polic-
ing system stretching upward from the community to the bureaucrats and to the judi-
ciary. Although they live and work among the poor, activists are more reluctant to
grant agency to the poor than the cash transfer advocates (often economists) who have
little contact with the lives of the poor and analyze poverty only in terms of statistical
aggregates.
The activists do not all speak with one voice, but many of them are driven by ideal-
ism of a sort that compels them to evaluate economic policies not just by the outcomes
but also by the perceived purity of the means employed to attain those outcomes. Cash
transfers are tinged with their association with markets, the World Bank, and neoliberal
economics. Although the case for cash transfers is just that it gets rid of the incentives
for corruption, it smacks of a market-based solution and therefore seems distasteful.
Electronic transfers of cash and the use of biometric identification seem like technical
fixes that rely too much on the profit-seeking banking and corporate sector.
But the government too is not to be trusted. It has also lost its credibility. It is corrupt
and incompetent and does not really work for the poor. The role of keeping the govern-
ments accountable has therefore been taken up by the civil society activists. Indeed, this
arrangement has worked to some extent in India, so far typically by getting progressive
legislation passed by the parliament that requires government action. However, since
the government is corrupt, the legislation is monitored using the muscle of collective
action at the local level. For example, organize the local community to monitor, to make
grievances, and to picket. A vigilant and alert local community is therefore the favored
solution of the supporters of PDS to the corruption in the system.
While the notion of a local community has been criticized elsewhere, the concept of
a village community capable of collective action toward a common goal has immense
appeal to those who value democratic politics.13 The mobilization of communities
around their right to food and getting them to collectively police the distribution of gov-
ernment grain supplies builds local organizations and community solidarity that could
be transferred to other causes as well: the right to health, education, and especially the
right to their land and water resources (against depredation by the government and cor-
porations). Therefore, in this narrative, the “democratic struggle” is a value in itself. In
this larger conception of rights and politics, the “narrow” pragmatism of an economist
does not stand a chance.
A hard-headed look at food subsidies might have, however, convinced some of the
advocacy groups among the poor that subsidies (in-kind or cash) are primarily distribu-
tive measures, and hence no particular value ought to attach to the means of delivery.
Only the outcomes ought to be valued. Such a statement would be dismissed, though, as
deeply ideological by the advocates of in-kind transfers. In their conception, cash trans-
fer marks the retreat of the state from its commitment to the inclusion of the poor and
the deprived in the democratic process.