A try with luck? Food subsidy policy will need reforms to fulfill the promises made to the nation in 1947

But many leftists disputed the poverty line and then the C Rangarajan Committee estimated the HCR poverty at 29.5% in 2011.

India will soon celebrate its 75th Independence Day and begin a year-long celebrations. But, before doing so, it would be good to see and see how India’s ‘try with luck’ has been all these years. Independent India began its journey through the deep wounds of partition with a population of about 340 million, of whom over 70% were extremely poor, and only 12% were literate. India was a sea of ​​great poverty and ignorance.

Winston Churchill had warned, “If India is given independence, power will go into the hands of the rascals, the scoundrels, the freebooters; all Indian leaders will be men of low caliber and straw. They will be sweet-spoken and fool-hearted. They will fight among themselves for power and India will be lost in political fights.A day will come when air and water will also be taxed in India.

But Jawaharlal Nehru was optimistic, and said in the Constituent Assembly on August 14, 1947, “At midnight, when the world sleeps, India will wake up to life and freedom. There comes a moment, which is rare in history. , when we move from the old to the new, when an era ends, and when the soul of a nation, long stifled, finds utterance. And yet for the greater cause of humanity… Service to India means service to millions of suffering people. It means the end of poverty and ignorance and poverty and disease and inequality of opportunity. .

It is against these plights and promises that we need to assess how far we have traveled. Depending on which side of the prism one is looking at, both Churchill and Nehru can be found to be correct to varying degrees. But, here, let me focus on the fundamentals: poverty, illiteracy and food.

From over 70% poor in 1947, India’s top-count ratio (HCR) of poverty fell to 21.9% in 2011, according to the then Planning Commission based on the Tendulkar poverty line. The decline in HCR during 2004–11 was almost three times faster than in 1993 to 2004, and was much faster than in the socialist era of 1947–91.

But many leftists disputed the poverty line, and then the C Rangarajan committee put the HCR poverty estimate at 29.5% in 2011. After that we have no official estimates of poverty. But, the World Bank has estimated that India’s HCR in 2017 will be between 8.1% and 11.3%, according to the international definition of per capita income of $1.9 per day (at 2011 ppp). Using the same definition, the World Poverty Clock has estimated India’s poverty at only 6% in 2021. One can speculate about this definition as well, but the fact is that the trend of HCR has been downward, which intensified after 2004 when GDP growth touched down. 8.4% per annum during the first seven years of the Manmohan Singh government (2004-11).

Could India have done better? Yes, provided India has invested in better quality education for the masses, especially the girl child. While India has excellent IITs, IIMs and AIIMS, and its overall literacy rate has risen from 12% in 1947 to almost 77% now, with Kerala at the top and Bihar at the bottom, the quality of education for the masses remains poor. ASER studies of Pratham clearly show that even in eighth grade children do not fully qualify for fifth or sixth grade. Without quality education, their income remains low and they continue to fall into the trap of poverty. The pandemic has created a digital divide between rural and urban school children. So a lot needs to be done on this front.

What about basic meals? The Green Revolution helped India become the largest exporter of rice (17.7 MMT) in FY 2011 from a ‘ship to mouth’ position in the mid-1960s, accounting for 38.5% of global rice trade. Is. But it has come at a heavy cost of groundwater depletion. Future policies need to focus on greater sustainability.

But if India has been so successful in reducing poverty and improving food availability, why does it have to provide almost free food (rice and wheat) to over 80 crore people under the National Food Security Act? India’s public grain management system of procurement, storage and distribution is perhaps the largest food program in the world. It is also the most expensive, inefficient and corrupt system, crying out for reforms. In FY21, food subsidies accounted for 31% of the total revenue of the central government. Giving free fish (rice and wheat) every day, instead of offering education and skill training to teach people how to fish, is definitely not the right way to proceed.

Our work at ICRIER shows that a rational food policy of gradually moving towards cash transfers to target beneficiaries can cut food subsidy bills by Rs 50,000 crore every year. Food policy reforms need to be accelerated if we are to fulfill the promises made to our people in 1947.

The author is Infosys Professor of Agriculture, Icrier