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COMMENTS

[This discussion has been moved to a separate thread from the event listing here ]

Mail exchanges on the subject on CAF googlegroup:

By a prominent member on 23rd May:

Just a, perhaps, moot point to which, may I draw your attention? The fact that PDS is woefully inadequate and is perhaps, a miserable failure is well known and equally well documented. What would one more such "interactive session" achieve?

Is there anything else, more concrete, that one could do to see some results? I am nobody to advise CIVIC on its strategy or methodology in addressing CIVIC issues [pun intended!], nor presumptuous enough to attempt to do so. Still, would it not be worthwhile examining what you hope to achieve from the programs you organize, especially, this one, and study when, if ever, the results are likely to materialize?

Why flog a dead horse?

 

By me on 24th May:

It is none less than Medha Patkar herself who has been the biggest critic of PDS, the way it is - read the article 'stop the robbery' (of over Rs 10,000 cr a year) co-authored by her at
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-2468448,prtpage-1.cms

I doubt it can be redeemed. Food stamps/ coupons suggested by some eminent economists has not found favour with the likes of Ms Patkar saying they can be counterfeited. But, I suppose there technological solutions to such problems today.

 

By Ms Kathyayini, Exec Trustee, CIVIC, on 24th May:

Dear Mr. Murali,

Thanks for forwarding the article which supports what we are also trying to achieve by 'one more interactive session'. We are asking that the vigilance committees comprising beneficiaries of the ration shops be set up to monitor the shop's functioning which in other words is asking for decision-making to go into the hands of the people themselves as envisaged under the 73rd and 74th amdts. reiterated in the article.

We are empowering slum-dwellers to use RTI to question the irregular functioning of the PDS shops, etc. The RTI applications by slum-dwellers and smaller 'interactive sessions' at ward level that we have held over the last year have brought about instant improvements. Shops have started functioning daily. Foodgrains are being given properly, bills which were not being issued are now being issued, vigilance committees are being set up. I think those are hopeful signs that things can improve with greater empowerment of the people and intervention of civil society organisations. This is even more important at a time when food prices on the open market have become absolutely unaffordable for the poor. We would not like to blow our own trumpet also, but I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that the F&CS Department is sitting up and taking note that someone is asking questions and monitoring its functioning in all the wards where we are working.

It isn't such a dead horse, after all, is it?

 

My response on 25th:

Hi Kathyayini

The poor in the state can certainly bank on committed individuals like you to do their bit for trying to work the system. Similar is the laudable effort put in by the likes of Dr Meenakshi in trying to work the SEC's existing electoral rolls maintenance/ updating system. But, as pointed out by Vijayan Menon, given the existing systemic deficiencies, the efforts put in can at best reduce the error percentage from the existing 55% odd to say 50% (http://bangalore.praja.in/bangalore/blog/murali772/2008/05/04/subversion-democratic-process), and in the case of PDS leakages from a level of Rs 10,000 cr per annum to Rs 9,000 cr. Are we going to be satisfied with that? Shouldn't we be demanding much better value for the taxes we are paying in terms of the quality of services provided by the various government agencies? And, these, I am afraid, can be achieved only by getting to the roots of the problem, and attempting totally fresh approaches.

Now, whatever the government may do, it can never possibly achieve the efficiency levels of say a BIG BAZAAR in the procurement/ distribution chain. So, why not leave the job to them, and work on the 'food stamps' suggestion that many eminent economists have made? The poor will benefit from the right quantity as well better quality, and the Rs 8,500 cr pa saved (which was earlier going to the various middle men in the chain) can be used for providing other equally important benefits to the poor.

Well, BIG BAZAAR will also gain. But, should that be a problem? It apparently is, today, with a lot of people. What other explanation can be there for not pursuing this line of thinking?

Muralidhar Rao

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Food in mouth problem Jaithirth Rao http://www.indianexpress.com/story/306230.html President Bush in his irrepressible way spoke out about the Indian middle class emerging as meaningful consumers and hence being at least partly responsible for the global rise in prices. This has come in handy for xenophobic politicians in our country (and we have many of those) crying themselves hoarse. Can diverting attention to imaginary foreign bullies help our government in dealing with the public clamour about prices of food-grains? It is always easier to blame others rather than face up to our own shortcomings. No government likes to see a rise in food prices. The Roman Emperor Diocletian discovered centuries ago that high food prices can be hazardous even to the unshakeable imperial throne. He experimented with price controls and as is inevitable when you ignore the rudimentary laws of economics, he failed. High prices overall are rarely an outcome of supply-side problems; inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. If we have global inflation today, it is because Mr Greenspan kept pumping up the money supply too much and for too long. He tried among other things to help President Bush fight a war without bearing its fiscal consequences. When money grows too fast, prices rise just as night must follow day. His successor, the intelligent and well-meaning Bernanke, has been forced to continue with easy money in order to save the financial system and prevent a Depression like that of the ’30s or a decade of de-growth as Japan has witnessed in recent times. The net result is that the inflation genie is out of its post-Volckerian bottle. The dollar is weak, aggravating the seeming price rise of commodities where international prices are quoted in dollars. As an aside, inflation is not that high in euro or Swiss franc terms. Despite our trading patterns (largely dollar-denominated), the monetary authorities in India have in fact reduced the dollar’s impact by strengthening the rupee quite a bit. But there is a limit to which they can hold inflation. The real question to ask is not whether there is high inflation, but whether relative prices of wheat and rice have changed. Here it seems to me that the data is not clear at all. Measured in ounces of gold or in barrels of oil or in ingots of steel or in bags of cement (as distinct from in dollars or rupees) we may not have any significant increase in the price of rice or wheat. When the analysis is complete (in twelve months from now — late as with all economic analyses) it may turn out that neither is the Indian Middle Class Consumer nor the US Bio-fuels Producer responsible for anything more than a lot of verbiage in the press. However, going beyond the money illusion caused by the unstoppable printing presses of the Federal Reserve, if in fact there has been a change in the relative price of rice and wheat (which is probably modest at best) it is worth looking into seriously, not with the foolishness and irresponsibility that one has come to associate with the current set of political leaders in India. It was the venerable statesman C. Subramanian who went by his intuition (contrary to the beliefs of World Bank dummies) that the Indian farmer was not stupid. The Indian farmer was an optimiser in a world of great uncertainty and risk. On average he may have received prices that covered his costs and gave him a fair return. But the “average” hid many risks. In years of glut, the Indian farmer had no insurance cover for his returns. This insight was the origin of the minimum support price and the procurement policies that kicked off the Green Revolution. The intelligent Punjabi farmer, once assured of a price, was able to plan better and produce more. We constantly keep saying that we are a nation of farmers and that agriculture is our backbone. Why then are we not happy if in fact the relative price of rice is up as compared to steel or oil? Why are we banning the export of rice and flooding the country with duty-free food items to the detriment of our patriotic kisaans? Why are we not praising Bush instead of berating him? The answer is simple — the welfare measures of our “socialistic” state have failed. While some farmers may benefit from high rice prices, all urban classes are hurt and our state is mortally scared of them just as Diocletian was! It must be pointed out that the Roman Empire and Victorian England were more advanced in dealing with issues of the welfare of the poor than we are. We spend tonnes of money, primarily for the benefit of contractors, bureaucrats and politicians — not for the benefit of the poor. For a country with the levels of privation that we have, we don’t even have public soup-kitchens or their equivalents through public-community-private partnership deals. All we have is monumental theft from the poorly executed PDS. And of course most of our agricultural welfare expenditure is marked not for the benefit of farmers or the poor, but the barons of the Fertiliser and Pesticide industries. We subsidise them and keep prices low resulting in overuse of these items which in turn causes untold ecological damage. The only intelligent programme in recent times was that launched by Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu where she encouraged temples and dargahs to provide free meals to the poor and encouraged well-to-do devotees to pay for them. She leveraged traditional beliefs and institutions in an imaginative way. Let us not once more fall into the trap of feeling good by criticising the “foreign hand” of Bush or anyone else. We have issues in Indian agriculture, but we are doing our best to hurt farmers. We have issues regarding the complete absence of the welfare measures we need to protect the vulnerable sections of our population. Let us fix these self-inflicted problems of ours. We will then have plenty of time to tilt at windmills foreign and homegrown. The writer divides his time between Mumbai and Bangalore jerry.rao@expressindia.com

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TS - Many thanks for posting this.

I think it is very objective & an accurate description about how our PDS system operates with manipulations.

 

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naveen i also liked the article because it was one one of those articles that does not indulge in triumphalism.

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For the first time in India, the government is distributing rations through a private supermarket. The Karnataka Food and Civil Supplies Department has set up a counter at Food World in Malleswaram, where items like rice, pulses and sugar are sold at subsidised prices to BPL cardholders. Food and Civil Supplies Minister Dinesh Gundu Rao told reporters on Wednesday about 300 cardholders could now buy their rations from the store. The government took the decision following complaints that fair price shops were not keeping open regularly.

For the full report in the New Indian Express, click here.

Excellent initiative by the F&CS minister.

The obvious next step should be to switch to Food World's and the Big Bazaar's themselves supplying the goods, against stamps/ coupons (or through Aadhaar credit), thereby eventually eliminating the PDS, perhaps initially in cities and towns where retail market is well established, and thereafter all through the country.

Not many tears are going to be shed for the PDS, except by those whose nefarious purposes it served.

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