Taking lessons from the vote-gathering power of a poverty-fighting initiative like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the Congress party promised a National Food Security Act in its manifesto for the 2009 general elections. Following the United Progressive Alliance (UPA)’s huge victory at the hustings, the president of India set the seal on the Congress party’s poll promise in her first address to a post-election joint session of Parliament on June 4, 2009. Just as the NREGA was enacted against the backdrop of a prolonged civil society campaign, the promise of a Food Security Act has in its background an even more protracted civil society campaign going back to 2001 when a writ petition on the right to food filed in the Supreme Court (PUCL vs Union of India & Ors) became a rallying point in the Right to Food Campaign.

(The Right to Food Campaign is a network of individuals, organisations and campaigns committed to work for the realisation of the people’s right to food. It was initially an offshoot of the Supreme Court litigation on the right to food but today the campaign exists much beyond it. This platform has a more or less nationwide presence and has resulted in the building of several state campaigns and thematic campaigns. For further details see www.righttofoodindia.org.)

Even though the Congress party pledged to enact a right to food law that would guarantee access to sufficient food for all people, it has constricted its vision to a very narrow focus: merely 25 kg of grain per month at Rs three per kg for families in the BPL list and subsidised community kitchens for the homeless and migrants in all cities. But even in its limited form this poll promise threw out a challenge to civil society i.e. how to exert pressure for the enactment of a comprehensive Right to Food Act rather than a token National Food Security Act.

Through various orders passed over the last eight years, the Supreme Court has already secured right to food entitlements for the people, especially the poor and the vulnerable, far wider in scope than the act promised so far by the UPA-II government. The challenge is to enhance these entitlements under the act, not to roll them back to a token dole.

The Supreme Court’s orders universalised the entitlements of central government schemes for children under six (through the Anganwadis) and those studying up to Class VIII (through the Midday Meals Scheme). By ordering that hot cooked nutritious food be served to children and that self-help groups be involved in the preparation of take-home rations to be provided for children under three years and for pregnant and lactating mothers, the Supreme Court stopped corporate interests and private contractors from providing packaged food.

The Supreme Court also enlarged the number of people who would be given cheap food at Below Poverty Line (BPL) rates under the Public Distribution System (PDS), maintaining the number of eligible people at 36 per cent of the population even though Planning Commission estimates showed a reduction of eight per cent in the poverty ratio. Similarly, it greatly expanded the scope of the Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY), intended for the poorest of the poor, by extending it to include six priority groups as a matter of right and ordering that all of them be given 35 kg of grain each month at Rs two/kg for wheat and Rs three/kg for rice. It also attempted to address the issue of leakages in the PDS by setting up the Justice Wadhwa Committee which is looking into the reforms needed in the PDS.

Since social security for the marginalised and the vulnerable requires both food and money, the Supreme Court also put in place entitlements to various pension schemes such as the National Old Age Pension Scheme and the National Maternity Benefit Scheme.

Last but not least, the Supreme Court put into place systems of accountability and redressal by making the district collector and the chief secretary accountable for the implementation of these schemes and appointed independent Supreme Court commissioners to monitor them, along with their advisers in different states. The apex court’s orders also empowered the gram sabha to conduct social audits of all these schemes and held the chief secretary responsible for any hunger deaths.

While these were landmark orders in terms of making government accountable for implementing the right to food of the poor and the vulnerable, an important limitation of these orders lay in the fact that except for children’s schemes (Midday Meals and Integrated Child Development Services – ICDS), the entitlements are not universal. For instance, PDS and pension benefits are restricted to BPL families. Similarly, the Supreme Court did not raise PDS entitlements in keeping with the nutritional requirements, for instance, by including pulses and oils. All this left a large part of the hunger situation unaddressed.

However, it is important to add here that although the Government of India currently provides cheap food under the PDS and AAY to only 6.52 crore households (about 32.6 crore people), various state governments have through their own subsidies been extending the PDS to reach many more people – about 11 crore households, or 55 crore persons. Some states like Chhattisgarh provide 35 kg of cheap rice (at Rs two/kg for BPL households and Rs one/kg for AAY households) to more than 70 per cent of the population under the PDS and states like Tamil Nadu provide the entire population with rice at Rs two/kg up to 20 kg per household.

It is clear that the Government of India’s suppressed poverty figures did not tally with the state governments’ own assessments. Yet there is no single answer to the question of how many poor people actually exist in this country. Different committees and reports at different points in time have arrived at different figures. For instance, in 2005 the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, chaired by Dr Arjun Sengupta, pointed out that more than 77 per cent of the people live on less than Rs 20 per day. The NC Saxena Committee set up by the ministry of rural development puts the figure at 50 per cent of the population. Most recently, the interim report by the former chairperson of the prime minister’s Economic Advisory Council, Suresh Tendulkar, puts the number of poor in India at 38 per cent of the population, based on nutritional and other social indicators. The Planning Commission places the poverty line at 28.5 per cent.

According to India’s chief statistician, Dr Pronab Sen (Economic & Political Weekly, 2005), "the current value of the poverty line does not permit the poverty-line class to consume the calorific norm and the periodic price corrections that have been carried out to update the poverty lines are inadequate and indeed may be even inappropriate. Consequently, the poverty estimates made in the years after 1973-74 understate the true incidence of poverty in the country."

The unreliability of all these estimates, the inherent problems involved in identifying the poor and the divisive nature of targeting are some reasons why the Right to Food Campaign has consistently advocated universal food entitlements under the PDS as well as universalisation of other schemes such as the ICDS and the Midday Meals Scheme.

When the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) approached the Supreme Court in 2001, the prevailing situation was one of hunger amidst plenty. The food stocks in the Food Corporation of India stood at 40 million metric tonnes of grain and grew further to 70 million metric tonnes by 2002. However, it is important to add here that between 2002 and 2004 the Government of India under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) exported more than 28 million metric tonnes of grain (much of it as cattle fodder) at prices below the BPL rates. The export of cereals was banned after the UPA came to power in 2004 but subversion of the law is a routine occurrence. This issue was also presented in the Supreme Court although this did not lead to any specific orders.

It is well known that in the last decade food production has not kept pace with the requirements of the population. On the contrary, it has dropped and thereby affected the availability of foodgrain. In the course of this public interest litigation over the past eight years the issue of food production and denial of the right of farmers to grow food due to various mining, agricultural and trade policies has not however been brought before the court. It would also be pertinent to state here that no discussion on eliminating hunger and implementing the right to food is possible today without addressing the issue of state support to small and marginal farmers, fish workers and forest dwellers.

When the government announced that it would formulate a National Food Security Act, various groups under the banner of the Right to Food Campaign began a series of national and state-level consultations on legislating for the right to food, which resulted in the formulation of a set of "essential demands" for the Right to Food Act.

The preamble to the essential demands recognises freedom from hunger and malnutrition as a fundamental right of all people residing in India and emphasises a policy of food sufficiency through sustainable agriculture with a special focus on rain-fed areas. It opposes the forcible diversion of land and water from food crops to cash crops or for industrial use and advocates systems of minimum support price, price stabilisation, effective grain movement and storage, and strict regulation of speculation and trade. Ensuring the right to food requires economic access to food, adequate employment and wage levels, protection of existing livelihoods, equitable rights over land, water and forest and overcoming the barriers of gender, caste, disability, stigma, age, etc. The realisation of the right to food also requires a system of direct food entitlements through public provisioning with affirmative action in favour of marginalised groups and making the government accountable at all levels to ensure that no man, woman or child sleeps hungry or is malnourished.

Some of the demands laid out in this document are already justiciable under Supreme Court orders in the right to food case, such as the entitlements for children, from the womb until they are 14 years of age, or for priority groups under the AAY. However, going beyond this, the campaign seeks to guarantee entitlements for all those who have been excluded from existing schemes, such as out-of-school children, migrant workers, homeless persons and people living with debilitating illnesses. In addition to creating an obligation on government to prevent and address chronic starvation, the law must protect the right to food of persons who have been internally displaced due to man-made or natural disasters.

Also among the essential demands of the Right to Food Campaign is that women must be regarded as heads of the household in all food-related matters such as the distribution of ration cards and that a serious endeavour be made to eliminate all discrimination against the scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, minorities and other backward castes. The campaign also demands the establishment of independent inbuilt institutions of accountability along with provisions for time bound grievance redressal, including criminal proceedings and penalties for violation of the entitlements; the introduction of safeguards against invasive corporate interests, genetically modified foods and private contractors; and an embargo on all laws and policies that adversely impact an enabling environment for implementation of the right to food.

If the right to food litigation in the Supreme Court brought the situation of children and the vulnerable centre stage and strengthened reforms in that direction, this time around the PDS is likely to be the pivotal issue in food entitlements under the forthcoming act. The Right to Food Campaign demands a radically transformed, universal Public Distribution System. Asked about his views on "targeting versus universalisation" of the PDS during a press conference on the Right to Food Act in August, noted economist Prof Amartya Sen said that there were strong arguments in favour of universalisation. For instance, a universal system is less divisive and helps to create a strong public demand for quality services. A targeted system on the other hand always involves exclusion errors.

The Right to Food Campaign envisions a Public Distribution System that involves local procurement of food in order to reduce transport costs and includes the distribution of nutritious grains, pulses and oil on a per unit basis according to the required nutritional norms. If this is agreed upon then the PDS will be the link between public provisioning and the provision of proper remunerative support to the small and marginal food-producing farmers.