Diets, Nutrition, and Poverty - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 357

entitlements simply because Fair Price Shops (FPS) are forced to carry lower stocks, as the
number of customers is lower than under the universal PDS.
56. Under the AAY scheme, the poorest of the poor are given the option to buy food at even
more subsidized prices than BPL households.
57. The case for cash transfers as an alternative to a universal food subsidy is not persuasive,
as it does not confront the difficulties of identifying the poor and risks of collusion among
functionaries at different levels. A case in point is Svedberg (2010).
58. A recent estimate of the cost of the NFSB by Kumar and Ghosh (2012) in the first three
years, taking into account the costs of covering BPL and APL households in rural and
urban areas, storage costs for the additional food procurement, leakages, provision of free
nutritious meals during pregnancy and six months thereafter and an additional maternity
benefit of Rs 1000 per month, nutritional food to children—especially the malnourished
and midday meals to those in lower and upper classes—and transportation costs to FPS
works out to be a staggering Rs 500,000 crore.
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