Renewing the tryst with destiny

Context: India has done well to reduce poverty. Policy must now aim at improving education, enhancing skills rather than giving freebies.

India’s strides in providing basic necessities since independence:

• Poverty reduction: From more than 70%  poor in 1947, the head-count ratio (HCR) of poverty in India dropped to 21.9% in 2011, as per the erstwhile Planning Commission’s estimates based on the Tendulkar poverty line. 
• A committee under C Rangarajan estimated HCR poverty at 29.5% in 2011. 
• The World Bank estimated India’s HCR to be between 8.1 and 11.3% in 2017, as per the international definition of per capita income of $1.9 per day (at 2011 PPP). 
• Using the same definition, the World Poverty Clock estimates India’s poverty at just 6% in 2021.
• Reduced illiteracy: While India is proud of its IITs, IIMs and AIIMS, and its overall literacy rates going up from 12% in 1947 to about 77% now — with Kerala at the top and Bihar at the bottom.
• Food security: with the country moving from a “ship to mouth” situation in the mid-1960s to become the largest exporter of rice (17.7 MMT) in 2020-21, amounting to 38.5% of the global rice trade. 
• This has been achieved through the use of modern technology, improved seeds, irrigation, fertilisers, and, of course, the right incentives for farmers.
•  India’s public grain management system of procurement, stocking and distributing is, perhaps, the biggest food programme in the world.

Challenges in provisioning basic necessities:

• Lack of better quality of education: The quality of education for large sections of the poor remains poor. 
  • Year after year, Pratham’s ASER reports indicate that a large number of children in the eighth grade do not fulfil the learning requirements of the fifth or sixth grades.
  • The pandemic has exacerbated the digital divide between rural and urban school children.
• Concerns with food security:
  • It has come at a huge cost of groundwater depletion.
  • Despite India’s successful poverty reduction and improved food availability, it still has to give almost free food (rice and wheat) to more than 800 million people under the National Food Security Act (2013).
  • Moreover, malnutrition amongst children still runs high.
  • Public grain management is an expensive, inefficient and corrupt system and is crying for reforms.
  • In 2020- 21, as per the provisional estimates of the Controller General of Accounts, food subsidy amounted to 31% of the total revenue of the Union government.

Way Forward: 

• Rationalising of food policy: A rational policy of gradually moving towards cash transfers to targeted beneficiaries, limiting grain stocks, can easily save Rs 50,000 crore every year from the food subsidy bill.
• Greater focus on sustainability with respect to the sustenance of food security.