Click to play videoNew Delhi: The Congress party has clearly shown that their way to the heart of the Indian voter is through the stomach on the eve of the polls.
With less than a month to go before the voter decides its leader, the party manifesto comes out with a grand pledge – Rs 3 a kilogram of rice or wheat for every Below poverty line (BPL) family throughout India and after five years in power Congress demands another term to bring in the right to food.
Meanwhile, Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao, Andhra Pradesh's mega cine star who started it all in his reincarnation as a politician, has promised rice at Rs 2 a kilogram. The opposition greeted it with disbelief, the liberals criticized it as populist, but NTR had the last laugh. The people of Andhra Pradesh gave him their vote. Welcome to rice politics.
The dangling carrot of cheap food grains is a technique which every politician would want to use.
People say Chawal Baba Raman Singh's victory has been because of his highly popular rice scheme at Rs 3 a kilogram. Orissa’s chief minister Naveen Patnaik's BJD has also announced rice at Rs 2 a kilo. Announcement of such schemes have everything to do with timing, it’s proximity to the polls and unfortunately nothing to do with genuine alleviation of hunger. It is competitive populism, plain and simple.
Critics point out that the pledge seldom yields genuine results. How many BPL families can you reach with the rice scheme when your PDS itself is in ruins. No government has really tried to improve the worsening public distribution system.
The latest round of NSS surveys show that NSS surveys show majority of the foodgrain never reach the poor.
Sixty-nine per cent of the BPL population in rural India do not derive any benefit at all from the PDS. The figure is 70 per cent for urban India.
PDS accounts for only 19 per cent of food requirement the BPL families in Rural India and 17 per cent of food requirement BPL families in urban India.
This promise is rich in political symbolism and in a country where nearly 300 million people do not have two square meals a day, it has the power of make-belief. However, for the parties, it is politics as usual.
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