Food security in India
Food security in India
food security in India now if in scientific terms we try to explain food security I can say it’s a some of Bufferin stocks and the public distribution system however we cannot understand this until and unless we are familiar with these terms so let’s first try to understand what is food security in very simple terms and then we’ll move forward on to a kind of specific terminologies now in simple terms I can say a person has a food security if there is sufficient availability of the food grains so this can be in form of the domestic production that is within the nation so let’s say you have India here so whatever production is there within the nation whatever imports that you are bringing from outside I all the stock that has been there like let’s say I have the production for 2017 but I have a kind of stock that remains from 2016 so that is stock plus the current production plus the imports is the total availability of the food grain now it’s not only the question about availability let’s say all of my food grains are fruits food grain silos are located in East India however the West India does not have any storage for food grains for example this is an example good so what is happening here is despite the availability of food in the nation there is poor accessibility so this food should be able to reach each and every corner of the country so the next important key aspect here is accessibility and finally is affordability that means at a correct price so you must have a correct price and this food grain stock is available to an individual so you have availability accessibility and affordability as the key concepts for food security now why do we exactly require food security if a person is where he can afford food then definitely food security should not be an issue however in a nation like India where you have numerous people below poverty line so food security becomes an important concern so it’s mainly for the people the BPL families are the instances of natural disasters all kind of calamities that occur so you have earthquakes droughts floods or tsunamis so in all these cases you require stock of food green in ready availability that should be there now what would exactly happen if there is a shortage of food if there is a shortage of food the price would increase since the price would increase less people will be able to afford the food stock and as a result the problem of starvation and hunger would increase because there are very few people who can afford to buy food grains at such a high prices as a result there would be kind of severe starvation and hunger that could occur will understand hunger in a separate section as we move forward now there are instances of severe starvation’s that occurred during the occurred during the various famines in India also by the time there were many epidemics and all these led to people with a starvation and one of the most commonly known famine in India was the 1942 Femina fish Bengal other affected areas Alcala honey and Kashyap are in Odisha then you have Barra district in Rajasthan and pearl mound is strict in Japan so these are some of the commonly affected areas now who are who are the insuk who are the people who are food insecure firstly the landless people’s the casual laborers in the urban area so let’s say we can classify this into urban and rural so in the rural you would have landless laborers landless farmers then you have in occupied like impaired occupations then you want to have people engaged in traditional handmade art and crafts traditional arctic are t-shirts then in the urban area you would have mainly the casual laborers so who get employment only during the time of construction all kind of marginal employment that they get then again social composition is one of the major sexual phenomena that affect food insecurity natural disasters as we said then nursing and pregnant mothers and finally general under the age of five who are mostly prone to food insecurities so these are some of the major six which we can say are food insecure now what would happen or what would be the incidences first of all there would be high rate of poverty the tribal and the remote areas would be affected the regions that are more prone to natural disasters you would have more incidences of food insecurity in India you have certain pockets like south and southeast with the Pradesh Bihar Jharkhand Odisha West Bengal parts of MP and Maharashtra where you have kind of food insecurity which is a major concern now let’s come on to another another term that is hunger Hunger I can say is an expression of poverty that means you have a kind of hunger index that could determine the amount of poverty or the level of poverty of innovation if you look at to this graph we can see 26 of the poorest nations of Africa
contributed to 410 million fewer populations however nearly eight states in India contribute to 421 million poor population that means in India poverty and hunger definitely a prime concern now this hunger can be categorized as to the
chronic hunger and the seasonal hunger the chronic hunger hunger is the innate inadequacy of the diet or the supply of food it mainly occurs in the low income strata of society however under seasonal hunger we talk about the growing food growing the crops harvesting the crops and the laborers in the agricultural sector get employment only during the time you have agricultural activities that is going on like harvesting or growing of the crops however the other seasons they do not have employment and there is a kind of seasonal hunger that occurs again in urban areas as we mentioned there is casual laborers so they do not get employment throughout the year as a result there is again a cyclic phase of hunger that occurs now International Food Policy Research Institute works on to calculate the global hunger index it has marketed four categories under which it classifies are the components on which based on which it decides the hunger rating of the nations there are 118 nations that have been created as of 2016 the first criteria is undernourishment that means the amount of nutrition that one should get and one is actually getting and the amount that one is getting is below the standardized level the next cells child wasting that is the people are children under the age of five years who are less in their weight as compared to the normal weight of that range child shunting is a kind of lower height slower growth in again under children below five years and finally child mortality is the mortality in the age group of five up to the age group of five in 2015 there was a revision where child and the meet was replaced by two separate categories that is ty and wasting and child standing so till 2015 there were just three categories mortality underweight and undernourishment however in 2016 it was bifurcated into two that is child wasting and child is standing as separate categories in India 2015 ranking India stands 97 out of the 118 that means in India hunger is really a cause of concern the only nations that were below India by the extremely poor nations of Africa that is neither child utopia Syria Leone and – only two of the Indian neighbors that is Afghanistan and Pakistan however four of the Indian nations that is Sri Lanka Bangladesh Nepal and China did much better as compared to India as we look out to the India’s rating over the years it has been on a decreasing trend that means we have worked the higher rates shows more amount of hunger problems so we have definitely worked on to improvement but still there is a lot more to go in 1992 there were only 96 countries that were assist an Indian strength at a 76 position in 2016 India became at the 97th position now here is how we compare their score with the other nations so you have the various countries and the various scores that are given so you have India which has a kind of very high school that means it has a kind of very poor situation in terms of hunger as compared to other countries and if we look on to the India under the four categories that have been given at other GHI the global hunger index we can see the in India the worst of lines in the category of stunted children less than five years so that is the major cause of concern now there are three definitions that we must be while we talk about food security and hunger or poverty is one of the major issues so first is hunger the next is under nutrition and malnutrition malnutrition means deviation from a normal nutrition pattern that means this deviation can be either towards the positive side or towards the negative side that means there can be problem of undernutrition or there can be problem of our nutrition which can be in form of obesity in young children so malnutrition is any deviation from a standard normal so you have under nutrition and over nutrition both as part of malnutrition and as nutrition means deficiency in any of the forms wheat calories B vitamins B it minerals and hunger is their distress associated with the lack of availability of food and this is one of the definitions that has been given by the Food and Agriculture Organization to explain boughten exact terms is hunger now let’s stop on to India India has been striding hard to provide food security to its citizens there are various ways in which government has been working the one of the most important measures that had been worked around post independence was the concept of Green Revolution that first came in to rice sorry meat and then later on it was expanded into rice and both of these world I am trying to provide increase the production of food grains however the best walked out shades for punjab and Haryana now there are few terms that we’ll understand first and then we will see how the buffer stock and public distribution system works now what happens is you have a kind of agricultural crop that is growing in the region so what does government do government tries to procure these agricultural crops from the farmers and keep it as a stock with the government with the Food Corporation of India and that islam is known as a buffer islam now when government is taking this crop from the farmers it is taking it certain price and this price assures a farmer even if there is not enough rainfall or not enough cultivation father would get a minimum support price which we call as M is P from the government that way government tries to incentivize the farmers now again this is the price at which government is procuring so let’s say if I am government and I am getting the food grains at this price so that is the minimum support price however once I have the stock with me I took it at a minimum support price I have a but buffer stock with me now I would try to distribute it to different people and when I’m trying to distributed to different people the price and which I would issue it it would be known as the issue price so issue price is a price at which government provides the food grain to other people and that is a kind of so standardized or I could say kept at a very nominal rate and that is what is known as the issue price and all these together help in the working of the public distribution system so here is how public distribution system works you have farmers or producers government and they provide the grains to food cooperation of India who maintains the buffer stock the Food Corporation of India interns provide the minimum support price to the farmers so this is one channel that is done now this FCI and against the grain two different is to states and the states and done give the central issue price so this is the issue price that each States give to the food Corporation of India now this state would further distribute the grains to the fair price shops we also call these as ration shops and these ration shop it in turn provide the issue price back to the state so this is how the public distribution system works and it is very important it has been very important in a country like India where there is a severe problem of food availability now so if we try to explain the process again here you have the central government who would procure it will it store it will transport it I’m located in bulks to the state then there will be a distribution that would be done by the state to the fair price shops or the ration shops and from the ration shops it would reach to the consumer now under this PDS system there have been three important steps or three important types of categories that have been made first is none though they are use now that is for the poorest of the poor the thing sells the BPL carts that is below poverty line card and all those who do not fall in the above categories will be allocated with the appian card that is the above poverty line cards now how has been rationing done in India it all started in 1940s in 1960s there was an actual shortage of the food rain that occurred in 1970s the poverty was analyzed by the NSSO and three important food systems were burned off the first was the public distribution system that we already talked about the next was the integrated child development system 1975 and finally food for work program in 77 and 78 besides these there have been poverty elevation programs the food for work program that have been going on another previous slide we have already talked about and though they are now that is providing the grains to the poorest of the poor and the unimportance team that talks about the providing the food grains to the senior citizens now this is how we understand the schemes that have been launched and the basic focus now period is the normal scheme that is being learned that is the public distribution in 1992 it was working then there came the devant public distribution system started in 1992 specifically focusing on the backward blocks now here you have the issue price for both wheat and rice under each scheme so let’s say under PDS rice was a showed at two point eight nine but under our PDS it was assured under three point seven five seven seven so these are the kind of issue price and these are the volumes that they have been allocated then came the targeted public distribution system started in 1997 it was allocating food range to both poor and non poor donto they are on the ocean attacks for the poorest of the poor in 2000 and the EPS the Kuna user for the senior citizens that provided the in kg of the food grains now next what are the benefits and the actual limitations that the system has been facing so the benefits are first of all it provides incentive to the farmers it is stabilizes the price even the poorer section of the society who cannot afford to buy the price who cannot afford to buy the food grains at a higher price has the availability of foodgrain it provides signed of security to the farmers who are producing the food greens because they are not aware whether this would be consumed in the market or not so they get at least a kind of minimum support price for that I again the most important thing is the areas of productivity where there are high this could be supplying to their deficit areas let’s say the desert areas of Rajasthan so that that has a real benefits however the system was criticized a lot and has is being criticized a lot for its limitations the first of all is the instances of hunger are not decreasing as we can see another global hunger index that has been released then when you are storing the food grains there is problem of pest infestation so you have kind of you have to compromise on the quality of this stock that has been kept again there has been large quality quantity of the strong that goes unused so it’s being wasted there is diversion of the grains that are going for the ration shops for the poor which are being diverted to the open market at lower price then the quality as we said and the storage cost is indeed very high so all these are the basic issues and a PDS and because of which there is a kind of real thought going under anything I hope to revamp this whole process of public distribution system however as we said in the starting public the food security comprises of two basic elements the buffer is stopped and the public distribution system so here is how we understand the stock that the government keeps and how the public distribution system goes at home