Abstract
India continues to have among the highest incidence of child undernutrition in the world, worse than several sub-Saharan African countries. An even more disturbing situation is the starvation deaths of the young and old. An important intervention directed at the serious hunger and undernutrition problem was the passage of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) in 2013. NFSA guarantees subsidized cereals to 75 per cent of the rural population and 50 per cent of the urban population, meals for school-going children, pre-school children, pregnant and lactating women, as well as maternity benefits.
In their edited book, Harsh Mander, Ashwin Parulkar and Ankita Aggarwal engage with the questions of whether the law does justice to the right to food (RTF) as conceived in previous drafts of the bill, constitutional mandates and international human rights mandates, and whether NFSA can achieve the goal of food security. As academics and activists, the editors are in an excellent position to put together such a volume.
Each chapter discusses the debates in different aspects prior to the passage of the act, roughly between 2001 and 2013. A running theme is the changes across several drafts, from the draft of the National Advisory Council (NAC), the Cabinet bill presented in the parliament, the Parliamentary Standing Committee recommendations and the ordinance, to the final act, and the recommendations of the RTF Campaign. This is a service in itself, as it shows us that the NFSA, crucial legislation as it is, could have been even more. The editors clearly state that the book does not deal with the implementation of the law itself or with food security in the context of urbanization. Instead, the legal, economic and political debates are assessed in a framework of the relationship between the emergence of a social security system based on human rights, constitutional mandates through the fundamental rights and directive principles of state policy, and international human rights mandates.
The book begins by tracing the origin of the state food provisioning system, leading up to the 2001 petition filed by the People’s Union of Civil Liberties in response to starvation deaths and the high incidence of undernutrition. Since then until 2013, the Supreme Court issued over 100 interim orders to the effect of recognizing the RTF as enforceable. These orders paved the way for re-interpreting the right to life as the right to live with human dignity, as opposed to its earlier interpretation as non-interference of the state with individual liberty.
Part I of the book defines the concepts and scope, and sets the international context. The relevance of social security rights is highlighted in the context of unequal wages, informal employment and insecure working conditions, in spite of rapid economic growth. This is particularly true for vulnerable groups and historically disadvantaged social groups. In the international context, the editors name India’s legal and policy framework unique, as it implements large food provisioning programmes and includes the RTF in its constitution. Mander convincingly negates the arguments against the law, while making the point that the act neglects agriculture, starvation and destitution, is not universal and does not extend to nutritional security. Although the act does not specify that the right only extends to citizens, access to the public distribution system (PDS) requires a ration card (Saba Sharma). It thereby excludes non-citizen residents and migrant or tribal populations without a ration card, conflicting with the universal principle of human rights.
One of the debates around the bill was whether its scope should be restricted to food security or extended to the broader goal of nutritional security, which would include providing access to sanitation, clean drinking water and healthcare facilities. Parulkar argues that the act and the earlier drafts restricted the scope to food provisioning and did not address the structural causes of hunger and undernutrition. He therefore sees it as “the first of a series of rights-based laws” (p. 80) that can address these causes. He succeeds in placing the debates in the broader context of the agrarian crisis.
Part II discusses several debates that reached a fever pitch before NFSA was passed. Aggarwal summarizes the arguments made in favour of or against targeting in the PDS and the experience of targeting in other food schemes. Following from this, she reviews the methodologies in poverty estimation, the BPL censuses and the Socio-Economic and Caste Census, and concludes that poverty lines need to be delinked from identifying beneficiaries for social security programmes. In the next chapter, she argues that conditionalities violate the right to unconditional social security and the key is instead to improve quality of and access to services. Parulkar then reviews the continuing debate on state provisioning in kind versus as cash, and concludes in support of direct provisioning of food, while supporting cash transfers as maternity benefits and social security pensions.
Part III discusses the methods of ensuring food security and the need to have special provisions for vulnerable groups. Aggarwal elaborates on the ways for the state to either directly provide food, provide the means to procure food, or encourage production of food, in the context of international guidelines. Parulkar highlights the issue that paved the way for RTF legislation, but remains a serious problem even today: starvation. He explains various definitions of starvation, and little attention is paid to understanding its determinants and responding to it. The NAC draft bill included a starvation protocol, but it was not discussed or included in the final act. He locates the apathy in the context of the history of starvation relief efforts in India and calls for a legally binding system of identifying and responding to starvation. This chapter is a necessary and enlightening contribution on an issue that needs to be taken far more seriously.
The editors discuss the problem that policymakers consider interventions in sanitation, clean drinking water, health facilities and food access to be mutually exclusive, without recognizing that these work together to provide nutritional security. They highlight the gaps in the act, which does not include certain services provided through the Integrated Child Development Services scheme, supplementary nutrition for adolescent girls, crèches or treatment of severe acute malnutrition, some of which were recognized as legal entitlements in the Supreme Court orders. Other chapters in this part compare the NFSA provisions for children, women and other vulnerable groups with drafts of the bill, RTF Campaign demands and international guidelines. Aggarwal reviews the debate on whether to provide cooked meals or micronutrient-fortified ready-to-eat meals to children, and concludes in favour of cooked meals and against the entry of private contractors. Sajjad Hassan underscores the importance of transparent delivery of food entitlements, and uses the examples of reforms in states such as Chhattisgarh to pinpoint some lessons.
This sets the tone for Part IV that deals with accountability mechanisms. Of the four sections, the theme of this section is perhaps discussed the least in academic literature, in spite of its relevance, and the chapters in this section are interesting contributions. Amod Shah raises concerns around the NFSA quasi-judicial grievance redressal mechanisms, including the lack of separation between their prosecutorial and adjudicatory powers and insufficient decentralization. He calls for a citizens’ charter that clearly defines the duties of different bodies. Following this, Sharma and Warisha Farasat highlight the absence of a strong victim support system in the NFSA, and Farasat further elaborates on the differences between parliamentary discussions and the NAC recommendations on providing compensation. Hassan argues for greater involvement of citizens, local implementing and vigilance committees, proactive disclosure and social audits. Sharma effectively uses legal, moral and philosophical arguments to provide the rationale for the state being the duty bearer of the RTF. Further, to the question of the extent of its duty, she argues that in a rights-based framework, even if the market is the most efficient alternative, it is not the most just one that treats all holders of the right equally. Shah ends with a well-argued chapter on the need to increase social sector spending and finance it through progressive taxation.
The book is well-organized. Although the chapters are separated into four parts, the last chapter of one part flows easily into the first chapter of the next part. Several chapters are linked to each other, and this is brought out without repeating the content. However, certain chapters could have benefitted from a little less organization—sections that discuss arguments for and against a position are neatly separated, but could have made for a more interesting read with an organic flow of arguments and counter-arguments.
Several chapters include informative sections that detail the changes in multiple drafts of the bill by various bodies, and the demands of the RTF Campaign, on coverage, quantity, targeting of food provisioning, and so on. The discussions in the book can be revisited in the context of the debate around linking Aadhaar to the rationing system, particularly when several starvation deaths have been reported to follow denial of food rations as their ration cards were not seeded with Aadhaar cards.
The book is written in a simple and accessible style, and is aimed at researchers in development studies and non-governmental organizations, but will be of interest to anyone keen on following the debates around the passage of the act. The book places the goal of food and nutritional security as a process that is ongoing, rather than one that was completed with the passage of the NFSA. It is an important contribution to the literature on food security, and can be used to further research and policy on achieving nutritional security in the current context of agrarian crisis, high and rising unemployment, tribal displacement, rapid urbanization and environmental crisis.