PDS Wastage & Amarthya Sen- Prof R R Pillai
Recently I was watching a programme on NDTV in which Nobel Laurette Amarthya Sen and Planning Commission Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia were in a discussion . The audience was a large number of students and the anchor was Dr Prannoy Roy.
In the course of expressing opinions on diverse issues confronting India be it corruption, healthcare, malnutrition, etc Amarthya Sen shocked me when he brushed aside the siphoning issue in PDS and laughed it off . One of the students present wanted the Nobel Laurette’s opinion on the siphoning of the food grains meant for the poor in India by the middle men to the extent of upto 45% and is it not a huge wastage of public resources . Sen reacted laughing how can it amount to a wastage. It doesn’t mean that the food grains are stinking and rotting somewhere. Somebody else is consuming that is what he meant.Now that is belittling the serious issue of corruption and siphoning of food grains meant for the poor by no less a person than a Nobel Winner in Economics.
How can such large scale loot by middlemen of the resources meant for the poor not amount to wastage of tax payers money in a leaky PDS system. PDS support comes at a heavy cost. The government uses the taxpayers hard earned money to keep poor fed enough through procurement. If such gigantic siphoning happens it surely is a wastage of scarce resources, the tax payers money. If the loot persists it amounts to enjoying the food grains by those for whom it was not meant , the targeted group fails to get the benefit and hence a waste of public money to keep going such a leaky system. The government should either stop the leaks or should transfer cash to the intended poor. else the waste continues. It’s not the physical waste of the food grains we are talking about. It’s the missing of the target envisaged under present PDS funded by the taxpayers money , which is always scarce for the government here facing a huge shortfall of resources to fund the social sector programmes in our country where still 80% earn less than $20 per day .
Sen should have shown enough sensitivity on the issue of wastage in our PDS machinery. If year after year a colossal amount of nearly 50% of the food grains meant for the havenots are siphoned off through a leaky system it surely is a wastage of public resources and there by not obtaining maximum social welfare via this huge spending programme supported by scarce tax revenues .
Since Sen was also concerned about the quantum of malnutrition in our country , the siphoning of the food grains meant for the poor may also be one of the causes for the poor suffering from lack of nutrition. Present leaky PDS certainly wastes a lot of public resources on many counts. Nobel Laurette Sen may think otherwise but we know when the pipes leak water is wasted.
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