National Food Security Act Research Articles

Estimation of prevalence of CIAF‐based undernutrition among under‐six children of India: A systematic and meta analytical review

AbstractUndernutrition is a silent emergency resulting from a combination of various social, economic, educational, demographic, and morbidity factors. This systematic and meta‐analytical review assessed the pooled prevalence of Composite Index of Anthropometric Failure (CIAF)–based undernutrition among under‐six years children in India. Articles were searched using Publish and Perish software and through reference exploration. The random effect model with the inverse method estimated the pooled prevalence (at 95% confidence interval, CI). Heterogeneity was tested through the I2 value and Q chi‐square. Subgroup analysis considered the National Food Security Act (NFSA), zonal distribution of studies, study location, and sample size. The pooled prevalence of CIAF‐based undernutrition among Indian under‐six children was 58% (95% CI: 0.54–0.62). After the implementation of the NFSA, the prevalence significantly dropped from 63% (95% CI: 0.58–0.67) to 56% (95% CI: 0.51–0.61). Undernutrition was higher in central and southern India (64%) but showed no significant difference between urban (58%) and rural (57%) areas (χ2 = 0.10; p = .76). The high I2 value (75%) indicated significant variation. Undernutrition remains a critical public health issue in India, particularly in central and southern regions. Enhanced screening, implementation, and monitoring of interventions are recommended.

Augmenting Use of Technology in Implementation of NFSA-2013

Technology has the potential to help governments live up to their ambitions for public policy and delivery. To increase the efficiency of the Public Distribution System (PDS), the Government of India has launched multiple Information and Communication Technology (ICT) intervention projects under the National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013. The article looks at the effectiveness of Aadhar Seeding, Biometric Authentication Systems, Fair Price Shop (FPS) Automation, Integrated Management of Public Distribution Systems (IMPDS), Mobile Applications (Mera Ration App), and Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT)- in enhancing transparency, accuracy, and accountability of PDS under NFSA, 2013 in the delivery of subsidized food grains in Assam. The study relies on secondary data. The augmentation of technology has the potential to increase the effectiveness, transparency, and accountability of the NFSA implementation and address the issue of food security. The authors suggest that ensuring the feasibility of FPSs, creating dashboards for data and reports for NFSA stakeholders, conducting social audits, and developing efficient monitoring and evaluation frameworks within the NFSA can greatly improve the efficiency of the PDS in Assam.

The techno-politics of human rights: The case of the National Food Security Act in India

To attend to the techno-politics of human rights is to bring into focus how tacit assumptions and norms about human dignity are rendered into technical, or implementable, legal frameworks and governmental interventions. Drawing on legal geography, an analytics of governmentality of human rights, and Nancy Fraser’s “politics of need interpretation,” this article presents an ethnographic examination of how the right to food, and its related normative principles, were translated and ratified, or not, into a food entitlement law, called the National Food Security Act (NFSA). It scrutinizes how the judiciary, para-public, and legislative lawmaking spaces in India have framed the formulation of what the hungry may need and how the state develop legal tools to satisfy (some of) those needs. Human rights policy-making is complex and messy. As this article shows, bringing into focus the technical and procedural process of human rights lawmaking reveals how which interpretation of food security needs were legitimized and which ones were not.

An Analysis of the Public Distribution System in Rural Haryana, India

Abstract Subject and Purpose of the work The present paper aims to analyze the functioning and coverage of the public distribution system in rural Haryana, India. Materials and methods For analyses, secondary data were taken from various government reports like the Economic Survey of Haryana, Economic Survey of India, Census of India, Food and Supply Department, Haryana, etc. The analyses were conducted using descriptive statistics. Results : The study’s findings revealed that the public distribution system facilitates 51.45 percent of the total rural population of Haryana. As Per the guidelines of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013, 75 percent of the rural population should be covered by the States under the benefits of the public distribution system. The public distribution system operates in the State with a vast network of Fair Price Shops (FPS) and a well-organized structure. The study revealed that the ratio of the beneficiaries of PDS to the FPS in Haryana is quite satisfactory and meets the criteria fixed by the Food and Supply Department of India. Conclusions The State of Haryana does not meet the criteria of NFSA, 2013. One primary reason is that a large part of the population falls under the APL category, which has been excluded from the benefits of PDS after the implementation of NFSA, 2013.While the ratio of beneficiaries to FPS indicates the magnificent functioning of FPSs in the State.

Do various dimensions of food security affect household welfare differently? An empirical investigation of India's national food security act

Do various dimensions of food security affect household welfare differently? An empirical investigation of India's national food security act

Understanding the policy discourse within the formulation of the 2013 Indian National Food Security Act

India was the third country in the world to enact into law a constitutional commitment to the right to food, following Brazil and South Africa. The 2013 National Food Security Act (NFSA) was the latest in a long line of post-Independence food policies aimed at tackling hunger. This paper explores the range of discourses among NFSA policy-makers, their views and disagreements, from drafting to the final Act. The research used mixed methods. Elite semi-structured interviews were conducted with 32 individuals who were either directly involved in NFSA formulation or food security specialist observers. Policy documents covering the period from before the Act and during the Act’s passage were critically analysed. Significant intra-governmental disagreements were apparent between two broad positions. A ‘pro-rights’ position sought to formulate a law that was as comprehensive and rights-based as possible, while a ‘pro-economy’ policy position saw the NFSA as a waste of money, resources and time, although recognising the political benefits of a food security law. These disagreements were consistent throughout the formulation of the NFSA, and in turn cast the Act as a product of compromise. Although there was broad consensus for a food security act, there was surprisingly little agreement exactly how that Act should look, what it should contain, and whom it should target. There was little consensus even on the right to food approach itself. The article contributes to the understanding of policy formulation in India specifically, and in developing countries in general, as well as to lend credence to the suitability of policy analysis to developing nations, otherwise normally grounded in Western traditions. The paper highlights a lack of cross-government cooperation in policy formulation, with the continued pressure of a short-term economic rationale undermining the policy goal of lessening hunger, despite some success.

The National Food Security Act and Impact on International Trade

The National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013, which was just passed by the Indian Parliament, intends to ensure food security in India, primarily through delivering subsidized grains to around two-thirds of families through the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS). The cost of such an ambitious rights-based strategy in the midst of slowing economic development and mounting fiscal deficits has been the most common complaint leveled at the NFSA. We believe that, while food subsidies have been increasing over the last few decades and will continue to rise as a result of this act, the incremental costs, at roughly 0.2 percent of GDP, are not as significant as indicated. Furthermore, recent evidence of increased TPDS use and lower corruption lends credence to the act's assumption that considerable revenue transfers to impoverished households can be made, enhancing food security and nutritional diversification. Several issues remain to be addressed in the act's design and execution, including its projected coverage, a cereal-centric strategy, beneficiary identification, and state flexibility. If these issues are successfully handled, the act might be a huge step forward in India's long-running fight against malnutrition and food insecurity. Finally, the NFSA presents a new chance to reform and improve the TPDS, which has long been an important part of India's national strategy to attain food security.

National Food Security Act (NFSA) - 2013 (Presentation Slides)

National Food Security Act (NFSA) - 2013 (Presentation Slides)

Time for Universal Public Distribution System: Food Mountains and Pandemic Hunger in India

The latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS 5) indicates that child stunting in India was severe and has been deteriorating since 2015. This trend could have worsened since the pandemic and the stringent lockdowns meant to contain it. There has been an acute increase in impoverishment as governmental food policies have further exacerbated rather than mitigated inequalities. Families eligible under the National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013, have been provided with double food grain rations during two waves of the pandemic. However, nearly 42% of India’s population without these ration cards have been largely excluded from additional food relief from the central government. Simultaneously, India’s food grain stocks in government granaries have accumulated to their all-time peak with 2 years of bumper harvests. Therefore, in light of the acute distress faced by marginalised communities due to the pandemic, this article analyses the availability of adequate food grain stocks and contends that the time is opportune for the universal expansion of the public distribution system.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FOOD SECURITY IN INDIA: EVOLUTION AND PERFORMANCE

After independence, India has mostly overcome the issues of scarcity of foods and mass deaths because of starvation. Government of India established the Indian food security system under the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution to allocate food and non-food things to India's poor at subsidized rates. The main objectives of food management system are: the distribution of foodgrains to the consumers, in particular among the vulnerable groups of the society, at affordable prices. The Government of India has enacted the National Food Security Act (NFSA) on September 12, 2013 with an aim to provide subsidized food grains to approximately two thirds of India’s population

Does National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013 Ensure Right to Food? A Ground Level Reality from Assam

This article assesses the effectiveness of the implementation of the NFSA, 2013 in providing food security to the people in the North-Eastern State of Assam which is known for several appalling reasons like poverty, insurgency, natural calamities like flood and land slide, etc. Based on the primary data collected from 400 sample respondents, selected on the basis of random sampling from 16 villages selected from four out of seven Tehsils in the Lakhimpur District, the study finds that the said Act has not been successful as per objectives of the Act in providing food security due to the factors like existence of malpractice by the implementing agents, poor utilisation of allotted and released funds, pilferage through ghost cards, illegal marketing of PDS commodities, poor functioning of Gram Panchayats in improving the PDS. The paper suggests that there is a need of strict vigilance mechanism to check illegal allocation of food material and efficient surveillance system to stop pilferage from PDS by removing ghost cards, organisation of awareness programmes among the beneficiaries, making Village and Gram Panchayat Samabaya Samiti (GPSS) level public committees to be effective, etc., in order to see to that NFSA is utilised best to achieve its vision of food security in the country.

Chasing Rights in Delhi: Social Movements and the National Food Security Act

In the 2000s, “rights-based approaches” to development acquired prominence in national level social policy in India. From 2005 to 2013, the Indian parliament passed several laws that effectively created new legal “rights.” This included a national legislation on the “right to work” under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) enacted in 2005 and a National Food Security Act (NFSA) on the “right to food” enacted in 2013. In text, rights created under these legislations expanded the idea of citizenship by defining justiciable claims that could be made against the state. The enactment of these legislations drew on a history of collective action and litigation centered on constitutional law and created the possibility of a new, progressive politics. Yet this positive expansion of citizenship rights has in recent years encountered a backlash and a de facto reigning in of rights. Part of this erosion of rights has been due to the Aadhaar based digital technologies using biometrics that were introduced as a key tool of implementation of social protection programs implemented under laws such as the NREGA and NFSA. Despite the present context of Aadhaar based erosion of citizenship rights, and the specter of coded and precarious citizenship, this paper argues that challenges to implementation of social policy need to be viewed in perspective. The role of social movements has been fundamental to the emergence of the aforementioned policies and legislations. Moving forward, the role of civil society actors in demanding probity in implementation of social policy, and in the reclaiming of citizenship, is critical for ensuring that new rights legislations retain their progressive potential.

Multidimensional impact of food security on household welfare: evidences from a household survey in three Indian states

PurposeThe welfare impacts of the food security on the beneficiaries can be understood from multiple dimensions. This paper, thus, examines the impact of the India's National Food Security Act (NFSA) on the welfare of the beneficiary households from a multidimensional perspective.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on a sample household survey covering three different states of India. The stratified random sampling technique was used to select the states, districts and blocks. Sample villages and households were selected purposively. A total of 1,523 households comprising 1,069 beneficiary and 454 non-beneficiary households constituted the sample. In order to find out the impact of the programme on different dimensions of welfare, the endogenous switching regression model is employed as it helps control for any absence of randomization and the unobserved heterogeneity bias. Propensity score matching is also employed to supplement the results.FindingsThe substitution effect and income effect of the food subsidy policy combined improve the overall welfare of the households presented through the subjective measures of food consumption behaviour, income transfer and educational achievements. The bargaining effect of the food subsidy programme is reflected in the enhanced social status and women's empowerment. The food security programme seems to augment the food consumption of the beneficiaries as observed from the food consumption score.Research limitations/implicationsThe food security policy has improved the overall welfare of the households and can play a major role in enhancing household welfare even further. The non-beneficiaries' welfare could have increased if they would have been included in the food security programme. The subjective assessment may, however, be subjected to personal biases, and there is also absence of a common reference point. Hence, the implications of the findings may be generalized with caution.Originality/valueThis study provides evidences of the impacts of food subsidy from a multidimensional standpoint considering both subjective and objective dimensions of household welfare.

When Biopolitics Turn Digital: Transparency, Corruption, and Erasures from the Infrastructure of Rationing in Delhi

AbstractFollowing the ratification of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) in 2013, the Indian state digitized its food rationing infrastructure, replacing paper‐based ration cards with digital rationing documents and other technologies of authentication. The shift from analog to digital documentary practices has rematerialized documents and devices to enable closer monitoring of the exchange of food entitlements in ration shops. Making biopolitics digital has enabled the state to exert greater control over rationing practices by rendering them more transparent. However, the state's obsession with preventing practices of corruption has hindered, rather than facilitated, access to entitlements for some rightful beneficiaries of the NFSA.

India 2025: the public distribution system and National Food Security Act 2013

ABSTRACTThe Government of India introduced the National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013 to strengthen the public distribution system (PDS) in India. Extending the PDS service network is a contentious issue, especially for India’s rural regions. This article aims to estimate the level of expansion of the PDS network, additional food grain requirement, and increased storage facilities required to serve the growing population of India up to 2025. The statistical analysis highlights the need for significant changes in the PDS to meet NFSA, and the findings can aid policy-makers to design a more robust PDS.

Implementation Status of National Food Security act (NFSA) in Drought Prone Bankura District of West Bengal

Implementation Status of National Food Security act (NFSA) in Drought Prone Bankura District of West Bengal

Forecasting of Area, Production, and Productivity of Food Grains in India : Application of ARIMA Model

Food grains occupy a dominant place in Indian agriculture. The demand for food grains is continuously increasing due to steady increase in the population. Food grains are an important source of energy and protein to majority of the Indians, who are vegetarians. Apart from this, the Government of India enacted the National Food Security Act (NFSA) which came into force with effect from July 5, 2013. This further put pressure on the demand for food grains in the country. Realizing the importance of food grains, the Government of India initiated various measures to boost the production and productivity of food grains since independence. As a result of this, the production of food grains has increased since 1950s, but still there is a gap between demand for and supply of food grains in the country which needs to be addressed urgently. In view of this, the projections for the area, production, and productivity of food grains for 5 years starting from 2016-17 onwards, based on the univariate time series analysis known as ARIMA analysis, was conducted in this paper. ARIMA (2,1,2), ARIMA (4,1,0), and ARIMA (3,1,3) models were fitted to the data on area, production, and productivity of food grains, respectively and these models were found to be adequate. The forecast values indicated that production and productivity will increase during the forecast period but that of area exhibited near stagnancy, calling for timely measures to enhance the supply of food grains to meet the increasing demand in the years to come.

Implementing Food Security and e-Governance Initiatives: A Comparative Study of Chhattisgarh and Telangana

Food Security is crucial in achieving the Zero Hunger, one of the crucial goals of Sustainable Development Ggoals (SDG). In the post-independent India, Public Distribution System (PDS) is an important policy intervention for providing the food security to the hunger and poor. There are certain challenges in the implementation of the PDS like corruption, leakages, ghost cards, market diversion of ration and other supply chain management issues. The paper attempts to understand the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools in reducing the corruption and ‘leakages’ in food security policy of India, concerning PDS programme for reducing the hunger. In the federal system of India, states play a crucial role in the implementation of the PDS programme and the states are advised to leverage the ICT tools in the National Food Security Act (NFSA). There are differences in the food policy implementation of various states by improving their information technology governance structure. Hence, a comparative study of two states-Chhattisgarh & Telangana Electronic Public Distribution System projects-will give valuable inputs for improving the policy and hence in reducing the hunger. The paper is based on the field level experiences of beneficiaries and interviews with the technocrats in both the states along with analysing the various policy documents of two states.

Food Grain Policies in India and their Implications for Stocks and Fiscal Costs: A Dynamic Partial Equilibrium Analysis

AbstractWe analyse current and possible future reforms of the Indian food policies for the most important staple grains, wheat and rice, within a two‐commodity dynamic partial equilibrium model with stochastic shocks. The model is empirically grounded and reproduces past values well. It uses a new reduced‐form approach to capture private storage dynamics. We evaluate the implementation of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) under several policy measures with the current regime as well as two scenarios with a regime change – implementation of cash transfers and deficiency payments. Implications for market fundamentals and fiscal costs are simulated in the medium term – until 2020/21. The NFSA puts a high pressure on fiscal costs and public stocks. Relying on imports with low support prices results in low fiscal costs and stable, but higher domestic and international prices, and a high risk of zero stocks. A policy strategy to manipulate procurement prices in order to maintain public stocks close to the norms leads to slightly higher fiscal costs with lower, but more volatile prices. The highest domestic price volatility occurs under a strategy which uses export bans in order to maintain sufficient public stocks. A cash‐based regime can bring considerable savings and curb fiscal costs, particularly if targeted to the poor, and would leave sufficient stocks due to higher private stocks.

The Hungry Nation: Food Policy and Food Politics in India

India has the largest number of hungry people in the world. Improvements in nutritional status have not kept pace with the country’s impressive success in spurring economic growth in the past few decades. This essay revisits India’s success in preventing famine and compares it to the country’s inability to improve the food security of hundreds of millions of its citizens. Why is the Indian performance on reducing hunger not any better? And why is India’s democracy able to prevent famines but not more effectively combat undernutrition? An important result of the right to food movement and the resulting judicial activism was the enactment of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) in 2013, which has attracted considerable attention regarding its potential to radically improve the food security of over 800 million Indians. I critically examine the historical development of the NFSA including its current provisions against the backdrop of heated debates over four broad sets of interrelated issues—availability of adequate funds, the specific roles and duties of various levels of government in India’s federal political set-up, the distinction between food security and nutritional security and the extent to which the country proposes to reform existing social protection programmes aimed at improving food security.