Even rough BPL estimates can be excruciatingly hard in the populous and unforgiving Indian terrain. With statistics often cited by smart Indian executives as a pretence of accomplishment, unspoken hard realities must be faced and creative mechanisms be adopted to ensure food security for India's teeming millions.
Firstly, though a universal PDS can be beneficial for the non-antyodaya, extreme poverty suffered by the antyodaya can only be mitigated by a targeted approach. A targeted approach together with NREGA emphasis on watershed development, self-sufficiency, and strong infrastructure to improve market linkages with the urban areas can be much more effective in screening, identifying and resolving malnutrition instances disgracing the nation.
Secondly, accepting the dreadful caste bias in India's poverty structure gives an impetus to adopting more mature policies for the backward castes and thereby alleviating a major chunk of BPL communities - a majority of BPL communities are the so called "lower" castes of India. The current "equality of result" reservation policy deprives the same people incentives for working towards their own betterment. Policies should rather encourage equality of opportunity to ensure sustainable long term empowerment. Though NREGA is a commendable step in this direction, much more could be achieved by using creative methods such as creating livelihoods for backward castes in fruit and grain packaging, processing and marketing within villages; income based affirmative action programs which restrict creamy-layer from additional benefits; improving rural management degrees and giving incentives to university youth to work for rural areas as a part of their degrees.
Much more can be done in India than wait for a universal PDS to come give us food which nevertheless ends up rotting in godowns.
