Food Bill: Is a rights-based approach feasible? Yes

The rights-based approach of the Food Security Bill is eminently feasible, provided it is combined with credible provisions for ensuring accountability. Fiscal feasibility is not currently a pressing concern as the total cost of the Bill is only around 1 per cent of the GDP and only an additional 4 million tonnes of grain are required compared to current procurement. I will dwell instead on other aspects.

Where social barriers and structures of power prevent people from accessing the most fundamental of human needs, as in many parts of India, legal entitlements give people something to fight for. The Right to Information Act (2005) and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005) have demonstrated that collective action can galvanise around these legal entitlements and empower people to make demands on the state, for what are anyway expressly the state’s constitutional responsibilities. Often, these are small initiatives that work locally but make all the difference to the lives of people who might have little recourse to alternatives.

When Dalit and tribal women in UP’s Sitapur and MP’s Badwani districts get unemployment allowance in the MGNREGS or a corrupt official gets sacked (in Bihar) or is asked to return money embezzled through petty corruption – post-office officials in Pakur (Jharkhand), panchayat officials in Surguja (Chhattisgarh) or Boudh (Odisha) – these demonstrate the power of legal entitlements to dislodge entrenched systemic failures.

The attacks on activists who expose corruption underscore the lengths the nexus of corrupt actors is willing to go to preserve a status quo when challenged through legal force. Admittedly, tangible results from previous rights-based initiatives are varied, from very impressive, as with the RTI Act and midday meals, to very limited (so far), as with the Right to Education Act. The successes, however, are a reminder of the transformative power of a rights-based approach.

The entitlements under the PDS in the Food Security Bill offer an opportunity for people, especially in resource-constrained settings, to ensure that they do not go hungry. Maternity entitlements and children’s access to food are long-neglected needs of those who are typically far removed from policy making and positions of power. Whether these materialise depends heavily on complementary efforts, legal, administrative or institutional, that provide redressal mechanisms. A roadmap for successful implementation exists in some States (TN, Kerala, HP). Commonsense technological solutions can aid this process, as AP and Chhattisgarh have demonstrated for the MGNREGA and PDS, respectively.

The general perception that rights-based approaches yield laws that are honoured in their breach stems mainly from a failure of accountability. When the latter are in place and combined with political will, a rights-based approach can go beyond achieving proximate goals. It can bring about a new work culture in government functioning and a sense of collective responsibility. In being deeply cynical about a rights-based approach, we inadvertently contribute to conditions that cause it to fail.

Read also: > Food Bill: Is a rights-based approach feasible? No

(The author is Assistant Professor, IGIDR, Mumbai.)

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