Finally the Antyodaya consciousness

By S. Swaminathan

A mountain of foodstocks and a long process of calculations about huge carrying costs (including inefficiencies of handling, storage and corruption) versus the enlargement of the subsidy bill - seem now to be partially resolved. If the Prime Minister's birthday could precipitate a long-pending logical decision on supplying 25 kg of foodgrains per month for 10 million destitute poor, it could well be a testimony to the fact that governance in this country continues to be a matter of ``fits and starts''. Nor is it unusual for such a crucial decision to have been taken without adequate spadework. Having decided to lower the issue prices of wheat and rice in favour of ``the poorest of the poor'' to Rs. 2 per kg for wheat and Rs. 3 per kg for rice, the Centre must now await the identification of the beneficiaries by the State governments. And then there will be the problems of logistics including pressure on the Railways to move the foodgrains to the appointed destinations not to speak of unintended and traditional conduits for diversion of stocks.

The PM's reasoning

The Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, was, of course, conveying commonsense, both in terms of economic prudence and of social sensitivity, when he talked about the incongruity of overflowing granaries and drought in parts of the country.

The fact is that government stock of foodgrains at 40 million tonnes as on October 1 was more than twice the buffer stock norms but what was even more anomalous was that while stocks had been progressively mounting (with all the hectic pressures being brought to bear on the government by States such as Punjab and Andhra Pradesh to procure even sub-standard varieties of grains), the drawals from the public distribution system (PDS) had remained disappointingly low.

Various theories have been doing the rounds seeking to explain why food stocks with the government were simply bursting at the seams. One was the all too facile (but largely unverified) hypothesis that the issue prices of rice and wheat which were revised upwards earlier during the year for containment of food subsidies, had simply kept the poor millions away from the PDS. Another was the argument that the quality of PDS foodgrains was rated so low by ration-card holders that they did not mind switching over to the open market for getting their supplies even at higher prices. That the second theory lent a measure of substance to the contention that levels of poverty in general had come down over the last six or seven years was not the least reason for its being rejected by political analysts and ``progressive'' economists, with or without credible statistical support.

Regardless of these controversies, how could anyone expect the Prime Minister to admit that the new Antyodaya Anna Scheme was not even a half-baked version of a national food-for-work programme which would really make a decisive dent both on poverty and on employment resulting in the creation of a vast network of social assets such as roads, irrigation channels, community centres, classrooms and so forth. Past experience with hastily- announced schemes of welfare shows that little happens when once the announcements are all made at glittering public functions.

Mr. Vajpayee himself narrated a not-too-ancient experience. Last year, the government had launched the ``Annapurna and old-age meal schemes targeted at destitute senior citizens. The schemes are not reaching the beneficiaries, according to the Prime Minister. Whether or not the basis for his conclusion is known, Mr. Vajpayee seemed to have no doubt that it was administrative failure which would explain the debacle of such thoughtful schemes of benevolent public intervention. The question, therefore, is relevant, of how sure Mr. Vajpayee is about the proper implementation of the new Antyodaya scheme!

Politics of empty rhetoric

The reactions of the Congress and the other Opposition parties to the Antyodaya scheme, announced this week, are predictably cynical. ``Such programmes are so much of empty rhetoric. There are other ways of dealing with the problems of the poor and even those relating to the accumulated food stocks''. This seems to be the line taken by the Opposition on such an elementary issue of using surplus foodgrains for eliminating hunger of the poorest of the poor. The tragic dimension of the criticism, by the Congress, in particular, is that over a long period of its rule, poverty had become endemic, especially in the rural areas and that villages had witnessed an enormous exodus of people towards cities and towns in search of survival. If there had been a viable developmental strategy, even with a population growth at an annual rate of more than 2 per cent, the country could have tackled massive poverty much more credibly than what a garibi hatao rallying-call could ever evoke as a response.

Antyodaya - a neglected paradigm

It is a mere coincidence if not a trivialisation of the Gandhian vision that a scheme for discount sale of foodgrains for the very poor now bears the Antyodaya label. In a changing milieu of commodification of human values, it might be important to recollect that Gandhiji looked at Antyodaya as the testament of human progress. Long before the country embarked upon planning, Gandhiji, influenced by Tolstoy and John Ruskin, had held out a vision of an independent India where the least privileged would become the focal point of all national progress.

Much more than a doctrinaire approach to ``development models'', Gandhiji's vision sprang from a composite notion of progress in basic humanitarian terms. The concept of deprivation which is so central to Prof. Amartya Sen's analysis of poverty, is simply inconsistent with what Gandhiji envisaged as a sane and sustainable social order.

That India has not measured up to this vision of Gandhiji would be an appropriate verdict on the country's first 50 years. Would it be too idealistic to hope that in the decades to come, Antyodaya could be translated into a national movement high above the din and noise over globalisation and the dialectics of Swadeshi and Videshi?

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