Scene 1 – The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) chief inaugurates the Indian Premier League cricket match – an extravaganza of glitz and glamour and an orgy of titillation with wriggling cheer girls. It is five hours of mega-entertainment.

Scene 2 – A little distance away at a ration shop, Mahadevi waits for the same five hours just to collect her princely quotas of 4 kg of rice and 2 kg of wheat, which the dealer weighs out with false weights. If she happens to be Above Poverty Line (APL), then the ration card is just an ornament, as it fetches her no grain.

Or, the one waiting could be Amuda, who gets up at 3.00 am to stand in the queue for five hours for the 7 litres of kerosene at Rs 10 a litre that the ration dealer dishes out, with a measure that has a false bottom. To top it up, he asks for Rs 75 instead of 70. Sometimes the women wait in vain and all they take back are the choice abuses heaped on them by the shopkeepers.

Suffering India

In “shining India”, the poor have to demean themselves even to collect the crumbs that the state is throwing at them, which hardly keep them alive. No wonder that 80 per cent of women are anaemic and nearly 50 per cent children are malnourished in this country. The irony is that the BCCI chief also lords it over the Food Ministry. Are there shades here of the Nawab of Oudh playing chess and watching dancing girls even as Lord Dalhousie gobbled up his kingdom?

The grievance redressal melas on the Public Distribution System (PDS) organised by the Citizen’s Voluntary Initiative for the City (CIVIC) has revealed that most of the PDS shops are open for about two days a month only.  Hardly any shops have set up vigilance committees as mandated. Shopkeepers are often not giving bills for the purchases. Customers are unaware that the Supreme Court has allowed rations to be taken in installments.

Neither the names of vigilance committee members nor the SC rulings are displayed at all the shops as required.
Just a few years ago, the country had a universal PDS which assured everyone a minimum amount of food. But the paradox is that the country grew at only 3 per cent then. Now the country grows at a spectacular 9 per cent, but the whole officialdom is engaged in developing criteria and conducting surveys to put people into neat boxes labelled Below Poverty Line (BPL) and APL, to decide who shall be given the crumbs.

But those put into the APL boxes, refuse to stay in them. This is understandable as the state’s own studies have revealed that 77 per cent of the country's people live on less than Rs 20 a day. 

Faulty yardstick

The Planning Commission does not want to change the all-so-pleasing, beautifully smooth, downward curving graph it has already drawn, fixing current levels of poverty at 17 per cent. It hence sends missives that only 17 per cent persons in every locality should be declared as BPL, irrespective of what the surveys say. The surveyors undo all the arduous door-to-door surveys they have done and strike off names at random.

Thus, Manjula and Valliamma, who were earlier BPL, suddenly find themselves APL even when their life situation has not changed in any way. The whole paraphernalia of the Food & Civil Supplies Department seems to be used not to reach food to the people but to exclude as many persons as possible from accessing it.

Only a few years ago, the country had 60 million tonnes of foodgrains in its godowns. But with irritating rabble-rousers going to the Supreme Court and questioning this irrational hoarding of grains even as the people were famished, the state thought it best to get rid of the stocks by exporting them, even if at prices lower than it fixed for its own citizens in the PDS.

On the other hand, it crushed the farmer’s life and his desire to grow more food by offering him prices less than his input costs.  As a result, the country is now being forced to import grain at prices higher than it offers its own farmers.  It seems to be a curious case of a psychopathic state taking sadistic pleasure in being cruel to its own citizens.

(The writer is a trustee of CIVIC, Bangalore.)