Abstract

 From its initial drafting to its eventual passage in the Indian Parliament and beyond, the National Food Security Bill has been extensively debated with a lot of animation by activists, economists, politicians and even corporate leaders. This article presents a brief summary of the debate in the backdrop of a discussion of the general issues related to food security and India's past record of food grain management. Since the Bill has now been turned into an Act, it is suggested that the focus of attention should now shift to its implementation mechanism and suitable measures to mitigate the apprehended undesirable consequences of the proposed nationwide food security programme.
Highlights
Food security may be defined as free‐ dom from hunger and malnutrition
Chronic food in‐ security refers to a state of “continuous inade‐ quate diet caused by the inability to acquire food
The Public Distribution System (PDS) share in rice consumption increased from 13 per cent in rural areas and 11 per cent in urban areas in 2004‐5 to 23.5 per cent in the rural sector and about 18 per cent in the urban sector in 2009‐10
Summary
Food security may be defined as free‐ dom from hunger and malnutrition. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations describes food security as a state where “all people at all times have both physi‐ cal and economic access to the basic food they need” (FAO, 1983: 33). Transitory food insecurity is defined as “temporary decline in the house‐ hold’s access to enough food. It results from instability in food price, food production and household income – and in its worst form, it produces famine” (World Bank, 1986: 1). Thanks to the persistent follow‐up of the inter‐ national community, over the years ‘right to food has come to be increasingly and exten‐ sively accepted as a basic human right. Instead of enforcing a uniform standard of food security for all coun‐ tries, the FAO has left interpretation and im‐ plementation of the ‘right to food’ to the coun‐ tries concerned in their respective economic, social and cultural context. To contextualise the summary, some space is first devoted to a discussion of general issues related to food security and India’s past experi‐ ence in dealing with these issues
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