The people starve, the food rots in godowns

There’s something rotten in Denmark and it’s not just the criminal loss of food grains being wasted in our granaries. The entire system of storage and distribution of food grains is itself rotten as is the way the public distribution system works.

In over 60 years, a fair and equitable system still eludes us and corruption and apathy are seemingly in control. Successive Central and state governments have tweaked the definitions of the poverty line, the quantity to be given and so on but these have not addressed the actual problem — food being denied to those who need it the most. Ration cards in most cases are used as identification documents.

The government is struggling to set the conditions of the food security bill and the Opposition is very rightly exercised about rising prices. The people themselves are trapped.

The government has admitted to an empowered group of ministers headed by Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee that 61,000 tonnes of grain has rotted because it was not protected. In Punjab and Haryana, 15 million tonnes has rotted.

But in all this, it is once again the judiciary which has asked the most important, burning and in fact obvious question. The Supreme Court has asked: “in a country where people are starving… how can food grains be allowed to rot in Food Corporation of India godowns?”

This is sadly not the first time that this has happened and it seems incredible that the government needs to be caught up in the bureaucracy and inefficiency which dogs the processes between the ministry of food and civil supplies, the Food Corporation of India, grain merchants and farmers.

Last year we imported substandard wheat while our stocks were overflowing. The mind boggles as the wastage that our system allows.

The courts have come to the rescue of the aam aadmi and instructed the government to divert the grains to the poorer districts in the country. That the government even needs to be so directed — while it constitutes committees and discusses the issue — is itself incredible.

Once more, though, it is judicial activism which is doing the government’s work -as we saw in the 1990s. Heartening though the court’s decisions are, a government which does not work until directed by the judiciary is a dangerous trend.