Why nutrition, not hunger alleviation, needs to be India’s primary focus
amrit kaal’, or golden era, is eliminating hunger in India. That is why the government decided to extend the Pradhin Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, or PMGKAY, scheme, which aims to provide free foodgrains to the poor for another five years beginning this month.
The government will spend ₹11.8 lakh crore to provide 5 kg of free foodgrains every month to an estimated 810 million people covered under the National Food Security Act. It is arguably the largest such intervention programme in the world.
Nothing exemplifies the existence of ‘two Indias’ than the fact that headlines on the free food scheme competed with headlines about India sending missions to the moon, our capital markets becoming the world’s seventh-largest, and another year of record economic growth. Even as India speeds towards its target of becoming a $5-trillion economy by 2025-26, free rations are still required for more than half the population.
But despite running the world’s largest free foodgrains programme, having the world’s largest public distribution system delivering subsidised grains, pulses and essentials to the poor, and running the world’s largest food intervention programme aimed at children–the mid-day meal scheme–India is a long way off from achieving a nutritious diet for its masses. While PMGKAY has been a resounding success, another ambitious programme has failed to meet its objectives.
The Poshan Abhiyan scheme (Prime Minister’s Overarching Scheme for Holistic Nutrition), launched in 2018 as a multi-ministry convergence programme with the goal of eradicating malnutrition in India by 2022, has missed its goal by a good margin. According to the UN’s report on ‘Monitoring the health SDG goal’ published in 2022, prevalence of stunting in
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