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Expanding Welfare Entitlements in the Neo-Liberal Era: The Case of Food Security in Kerala |
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T.M. Thomas Isaac and R. Ramakumar |
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This article primarily deals with two official committee reports submitted in 2009—the Tendulkar Committee and the Saxena Committee—on the estimation and identification of the poor in India. The recommendations of these reports have been critically discussed and placed in a comparative perspective, with the recent initiatives to expand food entitlements for the poor in Kerala. The Tendulkar Committee recommendations, even while they raise the poverty line marginally, fail to capture the enormity of mass poverty in India. The Saxena Committee, on the other hand, even while introducing a useful concept like automatic inclusion into the realm of identification, has chosen to keep the criteria for inclusion narrow and arbitrary. It is here that the experience of Kerala needs to be highlighted. Kerala continues to believe that social security systems like the PDS have to be universal in character, if they are to be efficient. Even as it struggles for a universal PDS, Kerala has adopted a system of automatic inclusion in the BPL list that is unencumbered by the compulsions of ceilings. The state has adopted a class approach to automatically bring all households in the unorganized sector into the ambit of the BPL list, and thereby the PDS. Kerala’s adoption of a class approach, to take social security systems closer to the goal of universal coverage, presents a picture of sharp contrast with the policies of the Central Government. |
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