The Food Assistance Debate in India

India’s seen a lot of economic growth over the past decade. But it’s still a very large and quite poor country, containing huge numbers of poor people. It’s become prosperous enough, however, that it seems like it should be possible to prevent widespread malnourishment from being a problem. Jim Yardley in the NYT looks at an ongoing debate between two different visions of how to do that. One, promoted by India’s traditional left, is “to create a constitutional right to food and expand the existing entitlement so that every Indian family would qualify for a monthly 77-pound bag of grain, sugar and kerosene.”

Another would be to scrap the existing ineffective food support system and replace it with something more like America’s SNAP (“food stamps”), a system that would distribute either money or coupons rather than food, and then let poor people buy the food themselves. Yardley’s view of the problems with the existing system:

The food system has existed for more than half a century and has become riddled with corruption and inefficiency. Studies show that 70 percent of a roughly $12 billion budget is wasted, stolen or absorbed by bureaucratic and transportation costs. Ms. Gandhi’s proposal, still far from becoming law, has been scaled back, for now, so that universal eligibility would initially be introduced only in the country’s 200 poorest districts, including here in Jhabua, at the western edge of the state of Madhya Pradesh.

With some of the highest levels of poverty and child malnutrition in the world, Madhya Pradesh underscores the need for change in the food system. Earlier this year, the official overseeing the state’s child development programs was arrested on charges of stealing money. In Jhabua, local news media recently reported a spate of child deaths linked to malnutrition in several villages. Investigators later discovered 3,500 fake food ration booklets in the district, believed to have been issued by low-level officials for themselves and their friends.

In terms of the empirical details, I’m sure there’s another side to the story. But it’s hard to think of any sound theoretical or ideological reasons to believe it would be better to try to give everyone a 77-pound bag of grain than to try to give everyone stamps or coupons. There’s a place for direct public provision of services in sectors where the private sector doesn’t deliver. But “stores that sell food” is something the private sector is more than capable of delivering. Poor people don’t get enough to eat because they can’t afford to buy the food, not because the private sector doesn’t create places to buy. Give people money and they’ll feed their families.