Chicken soup for the palate

You have heard about the two-cow jokes in economics, haven’t you? The one that goes as Socialism is if you have two cows and you give one to the neighbour. Communism is you give them to the State and the State gives you some milk.

Fascism is where the State takes away the cows and charges you for the milk. The list has since been expanded to cover a gamut of more recent events, including the one on Greek crisis.

Food security

There hasn’t been any unanimity on what is best for a society to achieve progress. Even when it comes to specific challenges of human condition, the world speaks in so many voices that it resembles a veritable Tower of Babel.

Take food security. How does one deliver food to the poor masses? If you ask the neo liberal, his answer would be, you don’t. He would argue that the poor should educate themselves (in fee-charging private schools, of course) and acquire some skill.

This would enable them to land jobs, earn incomes and go to the nearest Kentucky Fried Chicken and order for themselves, the outlet’s standard fare with the money earned.

If you ask the old-fashioned liberal in the Keynesian mould, he is apt to reply that the Government must build public schools, employ teachers on Government payroll, enrol the poor in these schools and give them a mid-day meal.

If you do it long enough, they would acquire skills and, hopefully, join the school administration department or at the very least become teachers in these schools.

Rickety distribution system

Ask the Government; its answer would be something along these lines. You create a monopoly procurement programme in the public sector. You undertake food grain procurement in massive quantities and store them in warehouses.

A small portion of what remains after the field rats and microbial organisms, low down in the food chain, have partaken of it, can be released for public consumption under a rickety distribution system (PDS).

It is preferable to have a vague system of targeting such that those who get chosen have greased the right palms, or have some local political connections or proximity to the petty bureaucrats in the Civil Supplies department.

The balance is exported to South Korea as cattle feed. It is also useful to throw into this mix some government-aided schools to implement a mid-day meal scheme and then round it off with a lament at regular intervals that minorities and tribals have been deprived of the State largesse.

There is now some talk about letting the poor file public interest litigation under a new food security law which would soon be enacted. But that remains to be seen.

Neighbourhood kitchens

I thought we had exhausted the range of policy options. But I have been proved wrong. News from the Chennai Corporation has shown that there is yet another method of delivering food security.

This calls for starting neighbourhood kitchens. Design a menu that is strictly limited to one or two items for the occasion.

Price each of them at a point that is way below what the most efficient and value-conscious street-vendor can hope to deliver.

Soon, you will have the poor queuing up right from the moment the local cockerel heralds the start of dawn. For now, the scheme is confined to just the capital city of Tamil Nadu. Also, to a mere 20 such outlets. A lot more needs to be done by way of scaling up before it acquires some cult status.

But there are aspects about the scheme that make it superior to the creaky PDS administered in most States. The PDS’ main drawback is the perennial risk of diversion of subsidised food grains to the open market.

The trick is to deny the poor holding ration cards their share of the food grain. This can be achieved by simply telling them that the stock hasn’t arrived. Since the grain doesn’t rot that quickly, a few days of inventory build up affords you the volume that would interest the grey market.

Given the right logistics network, in no time at all, a flourishing inter-state commerce can be created. The other attraction is that the existing system lends itself quite eminently to co-opting the ward-level politicians of both the ruling and the opposition parties.

Sustainable business

You then have a sustainable business model that can operate under the most vigilant eyes of a chief minister. This is where the State-run food outlets score over ration shops.

You can’t accumulate idlis (an item on the menu) for a week and hope to sell them in the black market. Ditto for sambar and curd rice varieties — the two items on offer.

If the State can scale it up appropriately, then it can, in combination with the attribute of short shelf-life that cooked food possesses, act as a natural deterrent against illegal diversion. Scaling up is not difficult.

You only need to co-opt the street vendors under some licensing arrangement for it to happen. The mere fact that there would be a number of them competing with one another would help in holding the price line at State determined prices.

What’s in a ‘quarter’

There is only one thing that worries me. The scheme would obviously cost a lot of money that would require some new source of tax revenue.

Or, perhaps, the Government can hike the taxes on liquor some more. A State such as Tamil Nadu derives Rs 18,000 crore in revenues from the licensing and vending of liquor.

But, therein, lies the irony. The fact of the matter is that a whole lot of them are consumed by the poor themselves.

Some statistic has it that 80 per cent of what gets sold in Tamil Nadu is the ubiquitous ‘quarter’.

You wouldn’t find too many rich and fat-cat patrons getting out of their BMW Sports Coupes and diving into the milling crowd at the state-run liquor outlets and purchasing liquor in ‘nip’ measures, except perhaps as an occasional act of reverse snobbery.

No, it is very clear that the poor alone would have to fund it. Now, that is a bit like growing corn and feeding it to broiler birds and then culling these birds for plates of chicken tikka as a food security initiative, when bread baked from corn flour would quell the pangs of hunger — whether of the rich or the poor — just as well.

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