Food security - Easy to feed poor, but not Gandhi family
The Union cabinet is said to have deferred consideration of the contentious Food Security Bill (FSB) because several senior ministers – Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, among them – have questioned its viability.
Just as well. The problem is not that the poor do not deserve food security, but a harebrained scheme is not going to deliver it. The FSB, as currently conceived, is a messy compromise between what Sonia Gandhi’s NGO mob wants and what the government thinks its finances can afford.
Net result: the FSB captures the worst of both worlds. It will neither guarantee food security nor help the government keep its finances in some shape in a year the world is going downhill.
In fact, we shouldn’t call it the Food Security Bill, but Sonia and Rahul’s Political Insecurity Bill. FSB is meant to secure the political fortunes of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, never mind the cost. Feeding the poor is only incidental to its aims.
To satisfy the National Advisory Council crowd, the FSB seeks to cover 75 percent of rural households and 50 percent of urban ones. To satisfy the budget’s minders, it seeks to create two categories of subsidies – very high subsidies for the ultra poor (“Priority households”), and moderate subsidies for the rest (“general households”). The cost of FSB will be Rs 1,00,000 crore in subsidies - and this could be an underestimate.
We shouldn't call it the Food Security Bill, but
the Gandhi family's Political Insecurity Bill.
Image Courtesy: Reuters
Priority households will get 35 kg of coarse grains, or wheat or rice at the 1-2-3 price: coarse grains at Re 1 a kg, wheat at Rs 2 and rice at Rs 3. The non-priority beneficiaries will get the same at half the minimum support price of these grains.
The problem with 1-2-3 is that it is not as simple as A-B-C. The scheme will fail not only because it is too expensive, but because it is simply unworkable due to its complexity.
As Pratap Bhanu Mehta argues in his Indian Express column, “the more a scheme relies on complex targeting, the more likely it is to fail.”
Mehta says that the FSB “creates Orwellian categories like priority households and general category households. And it introduces new forms of differential pricing. In short, it willfully incorporates into its design three features that have made schemes in the past a failure: impractical targeting categories, administrative complexity, and incentives to game.”
In Mehta’s view, the scheme should be universalised to give it a chance of success, but his objections do not go far enough.
The more fundamental objection one should have to the FSB is to ask where it fits into the overall scheme of social safety nets for the poor. Currently, we have scores of them, all of them implemented poorly. The two most important ones are universal – the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA, for short), and the mid-day meals scheme for school children. Then, of course, we have the current public distribution system.
Here are the questions to ask:
• Is food security about delivering subsidised grain to the poor or creating income opportunities for them and improving the public distribution system (PDS)? If we do the latter, we don’t need FSB to ensure food security.
• Is the physical delivery of grain more important than putting cash and choice in the hands of beneficiaries? Isn’t it simpler to focus on improving agricultural productivity, and let people buy what they want at reasonable prices?
• If one aim of the FSB is to deliver nutritious food to pregnant mothers and early-age children, should this not be integrated with the mid-day meal and anganwadi schemes – where cooked food is the goal? Should one create yet another system for pregnant mothers?
• Most important, why is it necessary to insure both income and food for the poor when one may do the job better? Should NREGA be streamlined and made more universal to generate year-round incomes, and perhaps include a dole, too, to become the prime safety net for the poor? There would be no need for FSB then.
• Is it sensible to proliferate schemes with similar objectives when we can improve existing ones to improve their efficiencies? If more than 40 percent of the PDS grain is pilfered or gets into the wrong hands, shouldn’t we be fixing this instead of starting yet another PDS under the name of FSB?
Sharad Pawar’s objections to FSB – that the scheme will drive up global food prices in case we need to import, that it will ultimately affect the interests of farmers, and that the subsidy scheme is fiscally unviable – are valid, but can be overcome with some planning.
But the ultimate truth is this: no government has the capability to manage so many complex schemes intelligently and efficiently.
It is a myth that organisations can target multiple objectives successfully. Just as most individuals can manage at best one or two tasks well at the same time, government can also manage only one or two things simultaneously.
The UPA government has thrown caution to the winds and is trying to do too many things without thinking about their implications and implementation. Just look at the initiative overload it has convinced itself about: after NREGA, it has legislated the Right to Education, and now is planning the Food Security Bill and universalsing health care. It is also planning to legislate tougher land acquisition and mining bills – both of which will take a huge amount of executive time – not to speak of a New Manufacturing Policy.
Quite clearly, the driving force behind all these initiatives is the political interest of the First Family – not national interest or the interests of the poor.
Proof: you cannot have long-term food security without an agricultural revolution, but the food and agricultural ministries are on opposite sides of the FSB battle.
Clearly, Sonia Gandhi’s political needs are trumping good policies. Bad politics is leading to bad economics.
The bottomline: the country has enough resources to feed the poor, but not the voracious political ambitions of the First Family.
Injustice in the Name of the Hajj
by Mohshin Habib
December 7, 2011 at 4:30 amhttp://www.hudson-ny.org/2615/hajj-injustice
The Hajj each year brings untold suffering for the poor Muslim families in the poor Muslim states. My country, Bangladesh, home to 170 million, was once known internationally as the poorest country in the world. It is still a poor country.
 | I would like to share a resource that has painstakingly documented and created an repository of resources on knowing Islam and its ideology. Resources - Website - TheReligionofPeace.com http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Pages/AboutSite.htm TheReligionofPeace.com is a pluralistic, non-partisan site concerned with Islam's true political and religious teachings according to its own texts. We present the threat that Islam poses to human dignity and freedom, and document the violence that ensues as a direct consequence of this religion's supremacist teachings. We are not associated with any organization. We do not promote any religion, but we are not hostile to religion. We generally support the rights of atheists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, homosexuals, woman, Muslims and anyone else on the planet to live as they wish without violating the rights of others. We strongly condemn any attempt to harm or harass any Muslim anywhere in the world because of their religion. Every human being is entitled to be treated as an individual and judged only by his or her own words and deeds. (see About Muslims). We also denounce any act of vandalism against mosques or other property, including juvenile attempts to offend Muslims by desecrating copies of the Quran. (The best way of discrediting the Quran is to tell non-Muslims what it actually says about them). At the same time, we see no use in pretending that Islam is just another religion - which always seems to be the assumption of those who prefer not to look too closely. In fact, Islam is dreadfully unique. What other religion's most devoted members videotape themselves cutting people's throats while screaming praises to their god? What other faith has tens of thousands of terrorists across the globe united by an explicit commitment to advance the cause of their religion by pursuing horrific mass murder and mutilation? What other religion has clerics lauded as 'moderates', 'bridge-builders', and advocates of 'peace and tolerance' who, at best cannot even bring themselves to condemn suicide bombers or denounce Islamist terror organizations, or at worst actually support terrorism, wife-beating, female genital mutilation and justify the killing of apostates and homosexuals? What other religion kills innocent people over cartoons and teddy bears, and murders humanitarian workers of other faiths who are merely trying to help them? What other religion actually celebrated the 9/11 attacks, described the carnage as "one of the miracles of the Quran" and proclaimed it to be "God's work against oppressors"? What other religion childishly brags about its growth while at the same time openly denies other religions equal opportunity to evangelize - and even endorses killing those who leave? What other religion has prominent PR organizations and charities so closely tied to terrorism - organizations like CAIR, which whine about dress codes and rubber ducks in the West while ignoring the Jihad genocide of thousands in Darfur? What other religion has verses in its holy book that remind men of their divine permission to beat their wives and rape their slaves? The list could go on (and does - each day on TheReligionof-Peace.com). Islam so routinely produces horrible atrocities in the name of Allah that no one is all that surprised when... Adults are tied to a tree or planted in the ground and bludgeoned to death by fundamentalists for engaging in consensual sex... A New York woman trying to file for divorce is beheaded by her husband, who also happens to be the founder of a Muslim-American TV channel dedicated to combating "misconceptions" and "stereotypes" about Islam... Religious leaders are charged by authorities with plotting spectacular acts of mass murder in the name of their god... Clerics advocate raping virgins prior to executing them for verbal crimes and political dissent... Pollsters admit that about 1 out of 3 Muslims worldwide (450 million) view the terrorism of 9/11 as justified... A Christian is murdered in front of his own family for leaving Islam, and his children then kidnapped and 'conscripted' by his killers... Muslims express no outrage when an admitted terrorist is assigned by a government to oversee "Islamic Affairs", nor even when unrepentant child killers are invited to make the holy pilgrimage with VIP treatment. 80% of all federal terror prosecutions involve a religion that is practiced by only 1% of all Americans... How shocking any of this would be if it didn't involve the Islamic religion. As it is, most of it barely registers in the media. The very fact that the bar of expectation is set so low for "the Religion of Peace" underscores just how different it really is from others. In fact, Islam is more than a religion. It is a rigid political and cultural system with a mandate to conquer and govern the lives of others via necessary force "until religion is only for Allah." Violence is sanctioned by the Quran since, as the Ayatollah Khomeini bluntly put it, "people cannot be made obedient except with the sword." Thus, the enemy of this orthodoxy is not just intellectual dissent and free speech, but human freedom. The divine charter of Islam is to impose itself and thus prevent the individual from discovering a different meaning for their own lives. Islam breeds arrogance and self-absorption, which accounts for the collective petulance and perpetual grievance characterizing Muslim populations in general - along with the astonishing unwillingness to extend equal moral consideration to those outside the religion. This disregard for others is rooted in the supremacist ideology of the Quran and Islamic law, which unashamedly draws the sharpest distinction between those within the group of believers and those without - towards whom arbitrary denigration is cast and hatred, harsh treatment and eternal punishment is prescribed. As a consequence, not a day goes by without someone, somewhere in the world being horribly murdered by devout Muslims in the name of this religion - over ten thousand persons each year. More innocent lives were taken in two hours by devoted Muslims on 9/11 than by the Ku Klux Klan in its entire 140-year history. Where Islam dominates, there is systematic discrimination and oppression of those of other faiths. Where Muslims are a minority, there is peevish self-interest, disloyalty and eventual rebellion and terror when demands for special privilege and entitlements are not met - all part of the eternal jihad to bring about the rule of Islam as Muhammad ordered of true believers. It isn't the victims who need lessons in tolerance and understanding - it is the Islamic world. Those willing to open their minds will find that, regardless of the excuse-du-jour, the remarkably wide-spread level of narcissism, repression and violence is deeply ingrained in the teachings, double standards and early history of the Islamic religion. While there is not a single verse in the Quran that commands love for those outside Islam, there are over 493 that either promote violence or speak of Allah's hatred for unbelievers - in a book that is largely about how to think of and deal harshly with those outside the "true" faith. Why rely on rosy platitudes and carefully-edited fragments of Quran verses from apologists when Islam speaks so well for itself? Beyond the whitewashing are obvious reasons why so many devotees do horrible things in the name of Allah, while most of the rest never seem to get terribly upset by it - busy as they are throwing tantrums and demanding for themselves what they explicitly deny others. How much favor are we really doing Muslims by not challenging them to the sort of self-critique necessary for moral progress? How much favor are we doing ourselves by desperately trying to accommodate that which has no intention of accommodating us, or by continuing to sacrifice blood and budgets for those who hate us in return? Is it really in our best interests to assist the expansion within our own borders of a religion that is consistently incapable of building countries in which even Muslims themselves want to live? Tolerance is a good thing, but not when we allow it to be used cynically against us by those who have no use for it once they obtain power. We need to back away from the altar of political correctness and throw out our preconceptions. We need to rediscover critical thinking. The truth is that Islam is not a religion of peace and it is not like other religion. Sometimes the truth isn't comfortable. Sometimes the truth offends. But it is far better that we offend others than lose our own freedom. See also: | |
