The capacity to endure injustice, death, destruction and deprivation is founded on a core belief in fate. There is no certainty when inflation will decline to the point where the poor can afford to eat the sort of food that India's nutrition-based poverty index deems adequate. The price index has gone back up and there is a grim signal in the curious up-tick in food prices even though overall inflation has come down to just over 16 per cent, which means the poor are no better off now than they were in December. Bubble-wrapped in faith, the Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee's response has been a formal reassurance that prices will come down some time soon and the only emergency measure that the Government has thought necessary is the decision to sell additional quantities of wheat and rice through ration shops as a solution to reaching food to people living below the poverty line. That will not deliver the sort of emergency care needed to protect the tens of thousands of infants and children — India's demographic dividend — whose future may well have been ravaged by hunger and the inability of their families to buy emergency health care. The promise that the poor armed with the guarantee of 100 days of employment would not suffer from hunger has proved empty, because for over 18 months inflation has raged out of control.
Pursuing a policy that despite its aam admi rhetoric is just the same old and useless trickle down development model that has not worked even when the Indian economy galloped along is part of the fatalism that pervades public policy and governance. Raising the bar on the number of people living below the poverty line to 37.2 per cent, up from 27.5 per cent, only implies that there are millions added to the already shameful numbers of hungry, that is, 43 per cent of all males and 48 per cent females. Pontificating on the advantages and disadvantages of food stamps versus universal rationing versus targeted rationing for BPL families, weighing the pros and cons of giving 25 kg per family per week against 35 kg, estimating the expense of selling the entitlement at Rs 2 a kg versus Rs 3 a kg are obvious symptoms of fatalism. More angst is displayed discussing cricket than inflation and its appalling consequences. Linking inflation to availability of food is a dodge that has been used for too long by the political class. Inflation needs to be brought down because it affects not just the poor but also economic growth and development. Food security has to be guaranteed as an entitlement because that is good economics, good politics and good governance.
