Why Congress can’t tell opponents not to politicise Food Security Ordinance

First published in Firstpost.com: http://www.firstpost.com/politics/why-congress-cant-tell-opponents-not-to-politicise-food-security-ordinance-960089.html

Critics of the National Food Security Ordinance (NFSO) have been rapped on the knuckles twice in two days by prominent Congress leaders. 

Yesterday, Digvijaya Singh told Congress bete noire, Narendra Modi, to stop playing politics over the food security law. In response to Modi’s barbs about the ordinance being a meaningless piece of paper, Singh said the main purpose of the ordinance was to ensure that food reached the poor and “it would be good if Modi did not politicise it”. 

Today, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, while addressing a press conference on the state of the economy, called the ordinance “the most important legislative measure of UPA-2”. With a piously stern expression on his face, he said, “I know that there are people who mock at the ordinance. I feel sorry for them. Nothing is more important than food security.”

Singh’s advice to Modi is not entirely misplaced. After all, the BJP’s opposition to the food security law is not a principled one, centred on the rejection of an inherently flawed rights-based entitlements approach. Political parties are united in championing bad laws and the food security law was no different. The BJP knew the vote-pulling power of this law and simply wanted to deny Congress the credit for legislating it. Even as the party stalled Parliament during the last session, BJP leaders were constantly making public statements that they wanted the National Food Security Bill passed.
But the Congress asking people not to politicise the NFSO is amusing at best and galling at the worst. The right to food legislation has been about nothing but politics from the start. Riding high on the so-called success of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the UPA-1 had promised a right to food in the 2009 election campaign and got set to work on this soon after it came to power. (This much one will have to concede to the Congress – it doesn’t make entirely empty poll promises.) 

Is ramming through an economically unsound law not playing politics? That too, with issues as serious as poverty and hunger? It is no one’s case that people in India are not going hungry, though the government surveys have themselves shown that the number is declining. But if people don’t have access to food it is not because there is no food – India has far more than its needs for its buffer stocks – but because people don’t have purchasing power. Legislating a right to food does not address this problem, which is at the root of food insecurity. There has been enough evidence that the food security law is going to play havoc with government finances. The deleterious domino effect this will have on the economy, which already appears to be in free-fall mode, has been pointed out time and again. Economist Surjit Bhalla has pointed out that the Bill will cost 3 per cent of GDP in the first year alone. Bhalla will no doubt be dismissed as a free market fundamentalist, but equally alarmist caution has been voiced from economists who are part of the government establishment. But the Congress leadership has not paid heed. Is that not playing politics? 

Chairman of the Commission on Agricultural Costs and Prices, Ashok Gulati, has pointed out the deleterious effect of the food security law on agriculture and the entire food economy in a paper, National Food Security Bill: Challenges and Options, (co-authored with Jyoti Gujral and T. Nandakumar). Those concerns too have been ignored. Is that not playing politics? 

And yet all these critics of the food security bill – the majority of whom are economic right-wingers, but social and political centrists – are dismissed with just one damning indictment: they are not pro-poor. Never mind that they have far more sound suggestions to pull people out of poverty and ensure food security. 

The target of Chidambaram’s admonishment was Modi, but it could well have been directed at all these critics of the food security law. Because in the binary world that the Congress seeks to push public discourse into, if you are a trenchant critic of the party, then you are a rank majoritarian communalist enamoured of Modi. And if you are not an ardent supporter of the food security ordinance, then you are an unfeeling soul who wants the millions of the poor to starve to death.

Amartya Sen, jholawalas, and the wrongs of rights-based laws

http://www.firstpost.com/india/amartya-sen-jholawalas-and-the-wrongs-of-rights-based-laws-758731.html

That Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has once again thrown his weight behind the Food Security Bill, lambasting the opposition for not allowing Parliament to pass the legislation, isn’t surprising. The venerable economist has been a champion of the rights-based entitlements approach for long.
This piece is not going to get into whether Sen is right or wrong about the National Food Security Bill 2011. This article, which links to other articles on the subject, effectively demolishes his argument.
The rights-based approach was discussed at the recent annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Greater Noida, where an ADB policy report, Empowerment and Public Service Delivery in Developing Asia and the Pacific, was released. Sen was part of the panel that discussed this report, which admits that its basic foundation is his “influential work on freedom, participation and agency”.
The report makes the point that despite tremendous economic progress made by Asian countries, they haven’t done very much in reducing poverty, malnutrition, improving health and education indices, among other things. This, it says, is largely because of inefficient delivery of public services. There’s little to dispute in these purely factual statements.
So how is this to be addressed? Being heavily influenced by Sen’s work, the report naturally tends to lean towards the rights-based approach to empowering people to demand better public services. But it also discusses community participation in service delivery, participatory monitoring of service providers (social audits, citizen’s report cards, grievance redressal mechanisms etc) and public-private partnerships.
Fortunately, it also highlights the problem with a rights-based approach, which Sen and other defenders of this approach almost never seem to talk about.
One, there’s the problem of resources. Two, the lack of institutional channels to enable citizens to claim their rights. Indeed, there’s little point in saying I am entitled to 100 days of work, or education for my child, or a certain quantity of foodgrain, or basic housing (another right that’s in the works) without adequate systems to ensure that I get them. Saying that these are justiciable rights also doesn’t mean much when I don’t have the time or resources to knock on the doors of overcrowded courts manned by overburdened judges.
Take the flagship National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). According to the latest Comptroller and Auditor General’s report on the scheme, employment was not provided to job seekers within 15 days of their requesting it. Yet, they were not paid an unemployment dole, which they should have been.
Or take the Right to Education Act, which has come into force since 2010. Can the government really claim that this has been a resounding success? Far from improving access of children to schools, the Act actually runs the danger of reducing access by laying down a slew of impractical stipulations that even low-cost private schools have to comply with or face closure.
That is the basic flaw in any rights-based approach to welfare entitlements – their implementation is hugely problematic.
Assuming, for argument’s sake, that this is a good approach, why not, then, use this to enforce existing Fundamental Rights in the Constitution? Why not ensure the right to “practise any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business” as enshrined in Article 19 (g)?
Why are self-employed people like street vendors, hawkers, rickshaw pullers and the like subject to a plethora of restrictions that make it near-impossible for them to earn a decent living and perhaps move up beyond the poverty line?
A cap on the number of cycle-rickshaws in Delhi has made rickshaw-pullers (for whom there is great demand in the suburbs) vulnerable to not just rapacious owners of rickshaws but also policemen and transport department officials. Street vendors too have their goods being routinely confiscated. If these people are freed from the licence-permit raj, there would probably be no need for NREGA or a Food Security Act in their present form.  That will make for a truly inclusive growth model (unlike the cronyism that we are seeing currently, which merely benefit a few corporate fat cats).
Similarly, if low-cost private schools were allowed to function freely, the problem of access to schooling at least in urban areas will be solved to a large extent.
Why not also restore the right to property as a fundamental right? This will allow poor people who may have land to use it as an income generating resource in whatever way they deem fit.
Let us also concede, again for argument’s sake, that the state alone will – and can – provide essential services to the poor. The record of its doing so is, well, poor. Ration shops routinely claim they haven’t got supplies, making a mockery of the public distribution system. Government hospitals claim they don’t have medicines. Teacher absenteeism in government schools is high.
If, as the report says, the government has to be made accountable, legislating a right to education, or food, or health is not going to solve the problem. As the report itself concedes, this has to be accompanied by changes in the way the government machinery works. Only one right is necessary to ensure that – the Right to Information (RTI).
The RTI movement in India gathered steam after it was used in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan to successfully get details about the working of fair price shops. If a below poverty line ration card holder can use RTI to find out why he hasn’t been getting his monthly quota of rice, wheat and sugar, that will do far more to make the system accountable than any food security legislation can. Because as the working of the NREGA shows, the mere enactment of an Act will not ensure that a poor person does get 100 days of work or 25 kg of foodgrain. It is an RTI which will tell him why he hasn’t. The RTI Act is already in place, but its implementation is patchy and there are constant attempts to dilute it.
Sen and his band of jholawallas would be better advised to focus on ensuring that rights like those to livelihood or information are enforced and implemented properly, than insisting that a plethora of meaningless rights are legislated.