Amid India’s devastating second wave of Covid-19 millions of Indians unable to access subsidised rice and wheat under India’s National Food Security Act (NFSA), a 2013 law that entitles 75% of the rural population and 50% of the urban population to receive highly subsidised food through the targeted public distribution system (TPDS). Two-thirds of Indians are eligible to receive quotas in different categories on presenting their ration card at designated “fair-price shops”. The TPDS is one of the world’s largest food distribution networks.
Currently, the NFSA benefits about 800 million people. But 67% of India’s 1.3 billion population is supposed to be eligible. The shortfall from the legally mandated coverage is more than 100 million, according to estimates by the economists Jean Drèze, Reetika Khera and Meghna Mungikar.
India’s domestic migrants, long unable to access their right to food because they live away from their home states where they are registered for the benefits, face more hunger and desperation today than at any time in the past two decades.
Analysis by Pew Research in March found that the number of India’s poorest people – those earning $2 or less a day – had increased by 75 million due to the recession brought on by Covid. Work and incomes have shrunk dramatically across most households. The month of April 2020 alone saw 122 million Indians lose their jobs, including almost all day labourers.
On 29 June, responding to Covid-induced distress among migrant workers in towns and cities across India, the supreme court ordered key reforms including expediting the rollout of a “one nation, one ration card” scheme to allow migrants to buy subsidised grain from outlets anywhere in the country, while their families continue to claim their entitlement at home. The country’s top court set a deadline of 31 July for this and also ordered registration of all casual and migrant workers, and community kitchens to be set up for labourers until at least the end of the pandemic.
“This will still leave out the millions who do not have ration cards at all,” says Mukta Srivastava, Maharashtra state’s convener for the Right to Food Campaign, a coalition of civil society groups whose lobbying led to the NFSA being enacted. “This exclusion in the current economic conditions exacerbates hunger,” she says.
During the pandemic, the number of Indians living below the international poverty line (less than $2 a day) has grown. One of the court’s directives was to consider re-determining the total number of NFSA beneficiaries. Yet, despite the pandemic’s effects on jobs and the economy, the government’s top thinktank, the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog), reportedly recommended a cut in the percentages of people covered in rural and urban areas, reducing total coverage of the food security law.
Cardholders are often unable to obtain their full quota, are turned away by shop owners or cheated with low quantities. Some items such as paraffin, a key domestic fuel, are no longer provided through the TPDS. Can a slum dweller without a job afford a cooking gas cylinder that costs 900 rupees [£9]?
Repeated increases in fuel tax have led to soaring prices, further eroding disposable incomes and putting more basic goods out of reach for millions of Indians. The first week of July alone recorded five increases in petrol prices and three in diesel; June and May each witnessed 16 separate price rises for diesel and petrol.
Another challenge in implementing the supreme court order was the technical problems involved. For the card to be used everywhere, all states must have electronic terminals, or EPOS machines, and the verifiable 12-digit identification number for the vast biometric Aadhaar system used in the machines have still not been fully rolled out.
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