[Reader-list] RTF (Right to Food) Articles - 7

[Rakesh Iyer]

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* Providing food *

* In the era of marketisation, public spending on social security sectors
such as health and education has given way to spending on areas whose
relevance to the immediate or long-term interests of the poor is not
obvious.Supriya Raychowdhury on the right to food. *

   IN THEIR seminal work on many dimensions of poverty and inequality in
developing countries, Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze have drawn attention to the
fact that in India the recurrence of famines has been avoided in the last
five decades; but unfortunately, situations of chronic malnourishment and
hunger have not been addressed with the same effectiveness. Today, we have a
situation where public awareness of the issue of starvation is kindled only
by an occasional media report on starvation deaths in specific locations.
But public interest over this question is short-lived.

The fact that millions of people go to bed hungry every night is,
unfortunately, a feature of our political economy that does not frequently
surface in the domain of public dialogue. It is not an issue over which
dharnas or strikes are conducted, nor one over which politicians undertake
padayatras, or over which elections are fought. Starvation is also not an
issue for which high-power committees are appointed, nor is it ever a matter
of heated public debate.

This collective ennui over a question of life and death makes the sustained
concern of some groups with the question of hunger all the more remarkable.

The "Right to Food Campaign" is an informal network of organisations and
individuals committed to the realisation of the right to food in India. The
freedom from hunger and malnutrition is defined within the framework of the
right to life. The foundational principles of the Campaign reiterate that
this fundamental right requires not only equitable and sustainable food
systems, but also the right to work, land reform and social security. The
primary responsibility for guaranteeing these rights rests with the state,
but the Campaign believes that in the present context effective state
intervention would be a function of effective popular organisation. The
group is committed to the creation of such organisations. Other abiding
concerns of the Campaign include first, effective implementation of all
nutrition-related schemes; second, introduction of cooked mid-day meals in
all primary schools; third, reform and expansion of the public distribution
system; and fourth, realisation of the right to work, especially in
drought-affected areas.

The Right to Food Campaign emerged in response to a writ petition filed in
April 2001 by the People's Union for Civil Liberties in Rajasthan. The
petition demanded that the country's large food stocks be used to protect
people from hunger. In response, the Supreme Court has issued several
interim orders. On September 3, 2001, the Court asked the State Governments
to complete the identification of Below Poverty Line (BPL) population and
the Antyodaya population (the poorest of the poor, consisting approximately
of the bottom four per cent of the population) and issuing the identified
people with cards indicating their BPL status.

This is a very significant step since being identified as BPL is often a
prerequisite for the poor to enjoy the benefits of food and other schemes
related to basic needs. Many people are unable to lift BPL rice because they
don't have enough cash, or they don't have cash at the right time. Many
ration shops open for only a few days each month, which makes it difficult
for poor families to lift their rice as they may not have cash at that
point. The BPL price (Rs. 5/kg) is so close to the market price (about
Rs.6/kg) that people get little benefit from the PDS. The thrust of the
Supreme Court's new directive is that Governments need to address these
lacunae by paying greater attention to those specifically identified as BPL.


On November 28, 2001, the Supreme Court passed another significant interim
order. This has three components. First, it converts the benefits of eight
nutrition-related programmes (such as the "public distribution system" and
the "integrated child development scheme") into legal entitlements. Second,
it directs the State and Central Governments to adopt specific measures to
ensure public awareness and transparency of these programmes; and third, it
directs all State Governments to begin cooked mid-day meals for all children
in government and government-assisted schools within six months.

The directive to State Governments to provide mid-day meals to school
children is central, both in the Supreme Court's directive and in the
campaign around the Right to Food. An estimated 63 per cent of India's
children go hungry every day. Half the children in the 6-14 age group do not
have access to primary education. That is, 40 million children are out of
school, according to the United Nations "State of the World's Children"
report, 1999.

There is now a great deal of evidence to show that a cooked mid-day meal
scheme could address some of the issues relating to school enrolment,
retention and learning levels. The results of a comparative study in
Karnataka, between schools where the cooked mid-day meal scheme was
functioning, and where there was no mid-day meal scheme, indicated better
enrolment and attendance, higher retention rates with reduced drop out rate
and a marginally higher scholastic performance of children in schools which
provided a cooked mid-day meal. A study conducted by the National Institute
of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, in a slum in the city notes the extent to
which attendance levels in the slum school are determined by the
provisioning of a mid-day meal. Not only is the meal an attraction for
students and parents, it also enhances the attention span and levels of
children and ensures that absenteeism due to illness is reduced (Urban
Poverty and Education Deprivation, NIAS, 2002). In Tamil Nadu, where cooked
mid-day meals have been provided for some years now, there has been a 30 per
cent reduction in the dropout rates in government and government-aided
schools.

The response from State Governments to the Supreme Court directive has not
been uniform. While States such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu had instituted
mid-day meal schemes even earlier, only a few States have responded
positively to the Court's directive. In Karnataka, for example, the mid-day
meal scheme has been introduced by the Government only in some districts in
the north-eastern parts. The local organs of the Right to Food Campaign have
repeatedly petitioned the Government for a Statewide introduction of the
scheme. In the most recent exchange, the Government has responded with the
usual reason — shortage of funds.

It is, of course, common sense that government spending on different sectors
is a question of definition of priorities. In the era of marketisation,
public spending on social security sectors such as health and education has
given way to spending on areas whose relevance to the immediate or long-term
interests of the poor is not obvious: for example, IT education or building
of state-of-the art airports.

The significance of movements such as the Right to Food Campaign lies in
reiterating the simple fact that tackling hunger must be a question of the
highest priority for any Government, way ahead of any other activity.

>From a human rights perspective it is ironical that this basic need is lost
sight of so easily in the business of government. While the democratic
methodology bases itself on numbers, the irony of democracies indeed is that
numbers do not translate to power or influence, as much as do access to key
resources. The poor in democracies are therefore caught in the vicious cycle
of exclusion from resources and power. From the perspective of crude
political calculations on which most democracies are founded, a basic human
need, for food, may be less important than the fact that that the starving
have little influence upon power holders.

It is therefore not surprising that the most sensitive response to the
question of hunger emerges not from state agencies but from private
initiatives where the response to hunger is determined by a human concern
rather than with political calculations determined by the power or influence
of different groups.

In Karnataka, where a Government-sponsored noon school meal scheme is yet to
take off on any significant scale, the most remarkable effort with the
mid-day meal scheme has, in fact, been made by a private concern. The
Akshaya Patra foundation, began a mid-day meal programme in July 2000, and
now feeds 40,000 children in 210 schools in the Bangalore Rural district.
Located on the premises of the ISCON temple in Bangalore city, the
foundation provides facilities for preparation of the meals and for
transportation to the schools. The foundation's target is to feed 250,000
children identified as needy in the Bangalore Rural district by 2005.

Surveys of the impact of the Akshaya Patra programme have shown that
attendance and overall academic performance of the students had improved in
the schools after the meal programme was introduced. Diseases such as
anaemia and skin infections, common among children of deprived sections,
declined dramatically.

The withdrawal of state welfare has occurred in advanced industrialised
contexts as in North America and in the U.K, where the marketisation
philosophy has been more powerfully implemented than in other industrialised
welfare states in northern Europe.

In India, in the present situation, the question would be whether and to
what extent private charity or community endeavour can substitute for public
spending in a context where the problem of hunger is as deep and pervasive
as it is here. Indeed, welfare is as much a community concern as a state
concern, but by definition community driven welfare programmes are limited
in scope, and can only support and supplement state action.

As the impulse to marketisation/privatisation expands, the logical
inclination of Governments would be to withdraw from welfare activities, not
only because of limited state resources (as the scope of taxation narrows)
but also because the provision of welfare is no longer a strong
ideological/political imperative.

Thus, while the market does little for the poor, it nevertheless provides
legitimacy for state callousness. For groups such as the Right to Food
Campaign, then, the struggle is to turn a reluctant state towards a more
positive welfare orientation. But the broader struggle perhaps lies in
highlighting the underlying contradictions between marketisation and welfare
in the present context and to continually question the current developmental
paradigm.

 * *

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