State finds many gaps in Food Security Bill

BHUBANESWAR: Differing with the Centre’s National Food Security Bill- 2011, the State Government on Saturday pointed out “many gaps” in the proposed legislation in order to achieve objectives of the food security rights for poor people. The State Government has demanded that the Centre should bear the entire capital cost to put up the infrastructure and facilities for the implementation of the bill provisions. Besides, it has also said that there should be a provision in the Bill to put a cap on the financial liability of the states at 10 percent for any scheme formulated to implement the law.While the Bill provides that priority households should get 7 kg per head at the rate of Rs 1 (coarse grain), Rs 2 (Wheat), Rs 3 (rice), the general households to get only 3 kg per head at the rate not exceeding 50 per cent of the MSP (minimum support price) for wheat and coarse grains.  “As the basic objective of the Bill is to provide food security, the general households should also have an entitlement of 7 kg per head instead of 3 kg per head which is quite low at the rate of 100 grams of food grains per day,” Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik told the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a letter while responding to the State’s stand on the proposed National Food security Bill, 2011.Naveen also strongly objected to the proposition that the Central Government would fix the poverty ratio in consultation with the Planning Commission without involving the state. “It is a clear violation of the federal structure envisaged under our Constitution,” he said in the letter.The Chief Minister said that the states should have a clear participatory role in determining such poverty ratios which will ultimately decide the allocations under the TPDS (targeted PDS). The sequence of first fixing the number of priority and general households by the Centre and then identifying them in the field by the State Government will create problems in actual implementation and needs modification, he said.“In fact, the number of priority and general households should be generated from the socio-economic survey conducted at the field level,” he said.The Chief Minister said that the creation of new institutions and posts, state commissions, district redressal officer would entail substantial expenditure for creating infrastructure and running them.Similarly, to provide cooked meals under new schemes under the Bill at village, gram panchayat/ward, block/urban local body or district level, infrastructure for cooking  has to be created, he said and added that to ensure proper implementation of the Act substantially more manpower would be required than what is envisaged.