Indian food security bill targets votes

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India is on the crest of rolling out a historic welfare measure that is billed to be the world's biggest social program: a food security bill that seeks to give to 820 million poor Indians the right to get 5 kilograms of food grains every month at highly subsidized rates of 1 to 3 rupees ($0.16 to $0.48) per kilogram.

The proposed program will cost the cash-strapped Indian government a whopping $24 billion a year.

The scheme is the baby of Sonia Gandhi, the president of the ruling Congress party and the chairperson of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in New Delhi.

The UPA government is keen on rolling out the food security scheme in 14 of 28 Indian states where the Congress is in power from August 20, the anniversary of the birth of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, husband of Sonia Gandhi.

Critics have decried this initiative as essentially a move to deflect the electorate's attention from poor governance and a scam-tainted record and coax them into voting for the Congress party in next year's elections.

The UPA government has been hauled over the coals for this approaching train wreck, as it will further fuel food inflation and may benefit politicians and bureaucrats more than those it is intended for.

In early July, the UPA government passed an ordinance for the ambitious scheme. The move was stiffly opposed by the opposition parties which cried foul over the government tactics to bypass parliament at a time when a parliamentary session was nigh.

The food security ordinance is now going to be debated in both houses of parliament, a process that is likely to start soon.

The Congress party's strategy is that people will forget about all the talk of misgovernance or even nongovernance and ignore its corruption scandals. The grand old party believes that the voters are largely interested in basic necessities, food being the most important of these.

This logic is neither wrong nor far-fetched. This is a harsh reality on the ground. Elections are not won or lost by how well or how bad you have governed, but how you have taken care of the poorest of the poor.

Various ambitious schemes of the UPA government, like cash transfers of government subsidies for fuel and other things, are aimed at this objective alone. The food security bill is the flagship measure when it comes to the strategy of winning votes and influencing the poor. But there are plenty of begging questions that need to be answered before this scheme can be seriously implemented.

Several state governments are already doing this, and better than the proposed central scheme. How would the UPA government implement this pan-Indian scheme in those states and with what moral authority?

The proposed scheme will benefit corrupt politicians and bureaucrats who will prosper at the expense of the poor for whom this measure is being introduced.

The government's public grain distribution system is already reeking with corruption, and the government pouring more funds into this system may mean fuelling corruption further.

India, a surplus food producer, will become a perennial food importer in view of the large food stocks that the country will have to procure to run the food security scheme.

To ensure that the scheme is run without a hitch, India will have to procure over 76 million tons of food, though the country has managed to procure only 45 million tons of food in the 2011-12 period.

And how does the government propose to identify the intended beneficiaries when no such mechanism has even been prepared? This is an important question considering that we are talking of the massive number of 820 million people.

Last but not least, there is the most important question: how is the government going to raise $24 billion? This is one question that the Indian government has consistently hedged about.

Finance Minister P. Chidambaram had set aside $1.64 billion in this year's budget for implementing the government's pet scheme on food security. But this money is far too inadequate for running the scheme on yearly basis.

All in all, it looks like the UPA government's food security program is just a poll-orientated gimmick, divorced from economic ground realities.

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