By Ashok Gulati & Raya Das

There’s a well-known saying: “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” In an earlier article (bit.ly/4fhwP65), a case was made to redirect a part of food subsidy — `2.7 lakh crore in FY23 — as investments in agri-R&D, skilling, rural roads, etc., which give much higher returns than food subsidy. But Milind Murugkar, in an article for Indian Express (bit.ly/3Cli8An) argued that food subsidies are investments, and not a waste. We welcome his comment in response to our article. In this context, we want to highlight three key issues.

First, if the objective is to support household incomes, as Murugkar argues, do we need to support this for almost 57% of the population, the current coverage for free food? If so, we better stop talking about reducing poverty by 248 million during the National Democratic Alliance rule, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi keeps saying in several fora. Second, would Murugkar support this public distribution system (PDS) if he knew that roughly 28% of free food never reaches the intended beneficiaries? Our PDS is still very leaky. Would he not then support direct cash transfers to the accounts of intended beneficiaries as a better option to plug the leakages? Third, can free rice and wheat solve the problem of nutritional........

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