Challenges of Food Subsidy in India
- Inadequate Food Distribution: Since the threshold for determining a household’s BPL status is imprecise, people who are eligible for the beneficiaries get excluded as they do not have below poverty line status.
- Corruption: Corruption is a major contribution to the challenges of food security. PDS dealers shift grains to the open market for a higher profit margin via the use of fraudulent cards and have been caught on occasion for committing fraud. In addition, sometimes they sell low-quality grains and open shops inconsistently which makes food availability harder.
- Flawed Supervision: Even though the government has a variety of food subsidy programs, they are not adequately executed. There is a lack of coherence in food policy and intersectoral cooperation across multiple ministries.
- MSP: The minimum support price is higher than the market price. The government pays MSP for major crops like wheat, paddy, and sugarcane to the farmers. However, other crops are purchased in low quantities by the government at MSP which demotivates the farmers to grow them. Since the major crops require a lot of water, it puts a massive strain on the water table.
- Limited Access to Isolated Areas: People in the rural areas and tribal communities experience substantial economic backwardness as a result of living in remote areas. It’s difficult for them to access different schemes and entitlements due to the unavailability of the right information and education.
- Other Challenges: There is insufficient storage to accommodate the food grains and sometimes it also gets damaged during transit which in turn results in poor quality of food grains.
What is Food Subsidy?
The food subsidy benefits both consumers and producers. It is used to acquire cereals from producers at quite a rate that makes farming profitable, and afterwards sell the grain to underprivileged households at a lesser price, or for free in some situations. Food security includes three major elements: Food availability, Food accessibility, and Food assimilation. Management and some other operational charges contribute to a percentage of such subsidies.
Subsidiary government programs aim to increase the real purchasing power of all or select sectors of consumers, minimize caloric and nutrient inadequacies in low population density, minimize the production of urban revenues and achieve intellectual growth.
The funding goes to the Food Corporation of India, which is the government tool used for the procurement and distribution of wheat and rice under the TPDS and other social programs, as well as keeping a sufficient inventory of grain production for food and nutrition security as a buffer stock.
Food subsidies are a vital safety net that protects farmers from poor market prices. rates while still customers who shop access accessible and affordable commodities through the welfare schemes.
According to the United Nations, India includes approximately 195 million people who are not getting proper meals, constituting something like a quarter of the world’s largest hunger. The Global Food Security Index (GFSI) ranks India 76th out of 113 countries in 2018, based on four criteria: cost, availability, quality, and safety.