Rs100aday

Is wheat/rice, sugar and kerosene the right mix for India’s nutrition safety? Should the mix be more balanced? Is kerosene supply outdated? This blog post looks at the current public distribution offer mix and tries to make a case for a better one.

-Tushar Vashisht & Mathew Cherian

In the post, Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish, we analyzed the nutritional intake one can hope to get from the current PDS mix of sugar and wheat/rice and proposed that 50g of soybean per person per day could do wonders to the nutritional intake. We had said:

The food allocation prescribed centrally under PDS or proposed in the National Food Security Act translates to 35 kg per family or 7 kg per person of food grains ,which is around 230 g of foodgrain per day per person assuming household size of 5. Let’s further assume that the 2 adults each eat 300g of grains a day (more than 50% greater than 3 kids). Now, this means between 1,110 and 1,000 total calories and between 20g (8% of total calories) and 40g (15% of total calories) of proteins – depending on whether you use rice or wheat, respectively – which is low for a person weighing ~70kg. Adding 50g of soybean to this could push the protein to 48g and 66g respectively, which is closer to the minimum healthy levels of 57g (0.8g per kg of body weight or ~20% of daily calories intake)

The difference would look something like this:

Should the government provide food to everyone as a right? Or should it be restricted to the poor people? The debate on how much food dole should be given to Indian residents and how the targeting of the food subsidy should be done has been going on for the last 2 years. This post tries to make sense of that debate given our recent exposure and the way forward.

Food debate #2: Universal or Targeted PDS?
-Tushar Vashisht

As two 26 year olds living at the infamous poverty line of Rs. 32, Matt and I clearly experienced that getting the adequate amount of calories and nutrition was exceedingly difficult if relying on market prices, if not impossible (See our post on nutrition for details). Access to subsidized food would have been of tremendous support, if not a life-saver. So what if we lived just above the poverty line? Should we have been denied subsidized food?

What should be the mode of food subsidy delivery? Should the government dole out cash instead of food? Or use coupons instead? The first post in the food debate series focuses on this ongoing debate in the government

Food debate #1: Cash or kind?
-Tushar Vashisht

The people in the right of center say, let’s abolish the food distribution system. After all, the govt shouldn’t be in the logistics/supply chain business. Their solution is to deposit cash in a poor person’s (lets call him Natha) bank account. Clearly, bank account income delivery works in NREGA. Delhi state government has tried this indeed, but counter-intuitively, received resistance from many poor families that prefer food over cash. [2]. The people left of center justify the resistance by saying that Natha might drink it away; at least in the current system, despite its leakages, Natha’s wife or family gets whatever it does get. There are other middle path seekers who are trying their hands on food coupons such as Madhya Pradesh and Bihar [3]. In fact, corporate food services company Sodexo was one of the bidders for Madhya Pradesh. The believers in the coupon system advocate that it makes the system demand led, empowering the end beneficiary, and could lead to choice at the hands of the customers as they could theoretically withdraw food from any fair price shop or perhaps even private retailers. However, perhaps what the government doesn’t realize is that coupons have the same, or at times even worse, problems as cash. If the Sodexo coupon experience in urban areas should teach us anything, it’s that it can be traded easily for cash at any outlet. In fact, given that it has less security features than cash, it can be easily duplicated as well.

by Tushar Vashisht

While India is a starving country (250 million malnourished people according to official records), it is also the world’s second-largest grower of rice and wheat. Today, more than 50 million tonnes of foodgrains lie in government warehouses. Only 27 % of government’s food subsidies reaches the poor, with only 42% of food grains issued from the central pool reaching the end customer [1]. Many solutions have been debated to fix the broken Public Distribution System (PDS). I was lucky to get exposure to many of these proposed solutions and experiments/pilots while working within the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI)  on UID applications. Because much of the focus of our experiment was around food and nutrition, Matt and I also spent a considerable time around fair price shops in Kerala. “The food debates” series is a description of a few of the key ongoing debates and my recommendations for solutions.

While coming up with the recommendations, I have tried to look outside the traditional infrastructure PDS is reliant on to search for new solutions. And, because most new things these days are tech heavy, it invariably meant looking at the emerging technology trends. Three stand out as universal trends:

1. Mobile (and therefore internet) connectivity is becoming close to being all-pervasive
2. Every family already has or will have a mobile phone pretty soon
3. Everyone will also likely have a UID number pretty soon

What does this mean? We are entering a world of new building blocks. Building blocks, that didn’t exist as late as two years ago, but whose relevance cannot be denied in the coming years. I will continuously refer back to these building blocks as we look at the various debates. This is not to discount value on non technology interventions which have their own importance, however, I have tried to focus on the technology aspects only.

It must be noted that these are my personal views only.