National Food Security Bill 2013:Highlights and Issues

Recently Parliament has passed much awaited Food Security Bill  which gives right to subsidized grains to two-thirds of India's 1.2 billion population of around 800 million, the largest such scheme anywhere in the world.

Below are the key highlights of the Bills :

• The Bill proposes food grain entitlements for up to 75 percent of the rural and up to 50 percent of the urban population at Rs.3, Rs.2, Re 1 per kg for rice, wheat and coarse grains, respectively. Of these, at least 46 percent of the rural and 28 percent of the urban population will be designated as priority households.The rest will be designated as general households.
• Priority households will be entitled to 7 kg of subsidised foodgrains per person per month.General households will be entitled to at least 3 kg.
• The central government will determine the percentage of people in each state that will belong to the priority and general groups.State governments will identify households that belong to these groups. 
• The Bill proposes meal entitlements to specific groups.These include: pregnant women and lactating mothers to have maternity benefit of at least Rs.6,000 for six months and  children between the ages of six months and 14 years, malnourished children, disaster affected persons, and destitute, homeless and starving persons.
• The state government will provide food security allowance to the beneficiaries in case of non supply of food grains.
• The eldest woman in the household,18 years or above,will be the head of the household for the issue of ration card.
• Grievance redressal mechanisms will be set up at the district, state, and central levels of government. 

Key Issues and analysis 

There is no doubt that this bill is going to be a boon for disaster affected persons, people suffering from hunger and poverty in general and under nourished children ,children suffering from malnutrition in particular.Moreover being integrated with direct benefit transfer scheme this bill is trying to abate the on going widespread corruption in public distribution system.

But at the same time ,as per planning commission report this bill burdened exchequer with huge sum of Rs 1.30 lakh crore thus further stressed the slowing down economy and sliding rupee.More over it will add up the subsidy burden by whopping amount of around 28000 crore thus posing a serious threat to fiscal deficit problem.

Nevertheless,this bill is meant for less privileged section of our society (at present around 37% of India  population is living under poverty line) and  act as a stepping stone to weed out hunger from our country.

Stay tuned for more updates....