Food security requires measurement of hunger and poverty. At one level, the debate is highly abstract, a battle of concepts both within the country and abroad, between academics with policy makers or bureaucrats thrown in. At another level, it is an intensely practical need and can make or mar the dream of ensuring food security. There are three main schools. The first is the Planning Commission concept of poverty and its critics. The second is the rural development surveyors of poverty with a field more than twice that of the planning statisticians. The third is the poverty ayatollahs who start with the rural development end and move on to the global concept of the World Bank studies in which almost all Indians are poor.
India?s poverty line is based on the average expenditure which feeds a person 2400 kilocal per day in rural areas and 2350 kilocal in urban areas, which was devised by a Task Force I chaired in the 1970s.
That Task Force was very sensitive to the impacts of markets on poverty and measured the impact of price changes separately for the rich and the poor in rural and urban areas. Later critics particularly from the World Bank argued that it was not based on market theory. But they were misinformed since they did not read the report.
The Planning Commission tradition continued, but was under question as the original context and databases changed. In 1988, I set up a group under DT Lakdawala to redefine the concept. Lakdawala unfortunately died and the report did not really give a new poverty line which it was supposed to but addressed the earlier measurement controversies.This led to considerable learned debate, but very little action. UPA-2 has now asked Suresh Tendulkar to re-examine all this.
The second tradition started because some states used the Planning Commission line, but others did not and used other indicators. They came out with higher numbers. The Indian Statistical Institute was asked to look into the old Planning commission line in terms of data available over a long period. It came out with the very interesting finding that most of the variations in the numbers were emerging from differences in price indices rather than nutritional differences.
Another tradition started with the World Bank estimates of poverty at a dollar a day. At that stage it turned out that if comparable prices are used across the globe in terms of what is called the purchasing power parity, a dollar a day was roughly equivalent to the Indian poverty line of the Planning Commission.
More recently the World Bank has changed all this. They use a very large number of studies, many based on different concepts and make different kinds of adjustments. For example, for many countries separate price deflators were not available for rural and urban areas.
So, in comparisons, you make the heroic assumption that rural poor in India have the same consumption pattern as the average person in rural areas in a rich country. Now this changes the whole tradition of the received numbers. For example, the number of absolute poor in India and China from the 1990s onwards changed in a relative sense in a very dramatic way, with the poor rising in India. Also with different norms, different poverty levels were introduced. This in parts reflected the prosperity of the world, but to a large extent was based on heroic assumptions.
So we got poverty lines of two dollars, two and a quarter dollars and two and a half dollars per day and according to some of these, more than nine hundred million Indians out of the billion plus are poor which probably means you and me are poor. In some sense this is understandable. We are really poor in a relative sense in the world. But it does not mean much for work for food security in India.
The trouble is that if more than three quarters of the population is poor, a food security plan is impossible.But households with at least one stunted child as a percentage of all households with one child is only one out of seven households. Households with at least one malnourished woman as a percentage of all households with one woman is one out of eleven households. Chronic poverty data mapped with the nutrition data shows that that the proportion of child and woman malnutrition is one out of eighteen households.This is clearly a manageable problem, even if a focused implementable programme will have to be larger than these numbers imply.
If the food security programme is to get going, it has to concentrate on this section of the population. It really does not need more than ten million tonnes of grain to solve this problem for ever. The question really is, will the poverty ayatollahs let the programme be concentrated on the chronically poor and the malnourished. The Congress President in her letter to the government seems to have concentrated on this section of the population, those who need employment on recurrent basis, the sick and the old, the girl child and adivasis. The more focused we are the better is the chance of the country succeeding in removing the scourge of hunger.
?The author is a former Union minister and former vice-chancellor, JNU