Food Security Bill-2013: A Flaw and Indirect Capitalism!

Food Security Bill 2013, a dream bill of  UPA-II government to secure food for two-third of Indian population. A Bill drafted with direct pro's and indirect con's. Bill placed in parliament without proper analysis or considering extreme cases. A Bill doesn’t have feature to adapt to long run, since bill confined . Let’s point out few unanswered points in the bill, which needs to be answered before implementing it. The scheme is most required for betterment of India, but certain changes has to be fine tuned to reach the correct person at the correct time. 

Central Pool:

• Central pool a storage facility for collecting and preserving foods for distribution under food security.
• In the present situation, Food corporation of India has storage facility to handle around 29 million tons, but actually we have storage requirement of over 61.9 million tons. If we implement the bill we require additional storage facility. (Already over 44,000 crs of food gets wasted without usage in India.)
• Government will in position to spent more on storage facility than actual amount on the scheme implementation.(Approx 2,00,000 crs required.)
• Government indirectly may open bids for MNC's retailers for storage facilitate across the country. The situation may lead to corporate inflating price index.
• Government as concern on end users of the scheme, but there is no proper explanation about the method of procurement, quality and rate of procurement.
• The government never gave any open or closed subsidy for the bill, so government lack definite road map for the plan. (Sometimes may cut funds for the scheme based on the political system.)  
• Since bill don't have any provision for direct procurement of food grains from framers, only private intermediates will exploit from the scheme. 

 Distribution:

• Scheme targeted to reach around 67% of Indian Population that's around 2/3rd of Indian population. The selections of the beneficiary were left to state government.
• The problem in Distribution of benefits was it covers around 75% of rural people and 50 % of urban people in India.
• States like Tamil Nadu etc were highly urbanized, so there is a requirement of more distribution to urban people along with rural people.
• In states like Bihar, etc.,  rural and urban people require more share of distribution than specified in scheme.
• Implementation of targeted public distribution system without proper framework for identification of people may spoil the existing common public distribution system. 
• A 5 member family can avail at a maximum of 25 kg of food. The quantity of food supply for family must be raised.
• The scheme as only provision for basic grains like wheat, rice, millet, etc. The bill must include provision for supply of Pulses, Dhal, food amenities, etc.

 Governance:

• The draft bill speaks volumes about transparency in governance using target public distributed system on customer side.
• The bill doesn’t have any provision of transparency on the supplier side. Generally, some large loopholes were found on procurement rather than at end point customer distribution.

Its a welcome sign that bill got passed in parliament, but still refinement has to be done. The bill should not be a mere election sop, but a long term enhancing plan for people. Government must find a new way of income to run the scheme on long run.

Source:-Com.Bharanidharan thought's, NewsPaper, Draft Bill.