Policy is what it does: State trading in rural south India

Abstract

AbstractThis paper explores why the Indian central government's legal obligation to distribute grain is not matched in practice by a right to claim it on the part of those who need grain most. The public distribution of rice is examined at state and village levels using a framework for policy analysis developed by Schaffer. Laws enacted are compared with the political objectives lying behind such legislation. The process of administration of public resources for state trading betrays the unprogressive management of capital and labour and the subordination of state trading to private mercantile interests. The expansion and diffusion of grain allocation is examined via the experience of access of targeted groups in a time of severe drought. The perverse mobilization of grain in scarcity, and its allocation in times of plenty, are mirrored by the reduction of grain quotas in the months of greatest need, and by their restoration afterwards. The ration system is subordinated to a politically more conspicuous child nutrition scheme. But both are affected by the interests of private grain merchants, by the tactics of bureaucratic coercion, by short‐term financial policy and by the use of food as a currency in political transactions between state and central governments. Grain, a symbolically powerful medium of political appeasement, fails to have a socially progressive distributional impact.