Food security bill: Loopholes

Even with around 478,000 public distribution shops (PDS) and the Rs 1.19 lakh- crore worth Food Security Bill, India is still not able to fight malnutrition and hunger. Deaths due to hunger have become a common phenomenon with more than 230 million people (equal to the entire population of Indonesia) being undernourished across the nation.

No doubt, Right to Food is an imperative for any productive civilised nation but then, it completely ignores the fact that the food security is not synonymous with a healthy society. In its current form, the Food Security Bill merely promises to feed the poor (at lower price), so that they don’t sleep on an empty stomach. It has not tackled the pertinent problem of malnutrition which is the root cause of several deadly diseases that kills millions every year.

We are currently ranked 65th, below countries like Sudan and Zimbabwe in the Global Hunger Index 2009 with more than 45 per cent of children under the age of three being underweight.

According to a study released in September 2010, one out of every two Indian kids is malnourished. These studies highlight the sorry state of nutritive food available for the masses.

The problem here is not about food distribution but is more about intake of food. The food distributed takes care of survival and not of survival with dignity. The Food Security Bill, that could have solved this double-edged problem, pushes wheat and rice through PDS and four other essential commodities, but no pulses which are a major source of nutrition.

There has been practically no initiative to include cereals like bajra, ragi, maize, soya and others through the public distribution shops . Cereals like maize, bengal gram and red gram (rich in proteins, carbohydrates, calcium, zinc, amino acids, and lysine) failed to make it to the list of PDS supplied food items.

The design of our food security bill is based on the minimum calorie requirement, which in itself is quite vague. For instance, a healthy child in the age group of 1-3 requires around 1200 Kcal which can be fulfilled by taking only a particular type of food. But then, this won’t solve the problem of malnutrition and immune deficiency. The Food Security Bill needs to be made holistic by including legislation on food fortification. FDA, in the US, has made it mandatory for all milk processing companies to add Vitamin D during pasteurisation. Countries like Nigeria add Vitamin A to essential food items to make sure that the consumer by default consumes necessary vitamins. More than 50 countries have made fortification of foods with specific micro-nutrients mandatory.

A study by the World Bank found out that a very high level of malnutrition has a negative impact on the country's economic growth and in the case of India – it has led to a four per cent loss of GDP. According to ILSI, “The percentage increase in cost for the food industry to produce fortified food, especially biscuits, wheat, rice and milk, would only be between 0.05 per cent and two per cent and for the consumer an increase of 35 paise per day,” which is far less than the economic loss created due to malnutrition and related diseases. What we need is a holistic legislation making food fortification and distribution of nutritive cereals mandatory, or else this bill will fail to achieve its long-term objectives.