Poor in India Starve as Politicians Steal $14.5 Billion of Food

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-28/poor-in-india-starve-as-politicians-steal-14-5-billion-of-food.html

by codelion • 14 years ago

234 185 14 years ago

pessimist3• 14 years ago

Incidentally, the problematic public distribution system is solved in parts of India, most notably the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu - http://www.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article2475948.ece. The estimated loss in Tamil Nadu is 4%, as opposed to over 90% in some states.

Tamil Nadu politicians are not any less corrupt than other states. However the PDS has some notable features:

1. It is universal - not restricted to only people below the "poverty line". Thus many people are incentivized to have it work.

2. The PDS "ration" shops are run cooperatively by localities and villages, not private dealers.

3. Simple schemes make it transparent like an SMS that will reply telling you the current stock of a given shop, when new stocks will arrive and so on so that the shop keeper cannot simply cheat you out of your ration.

kamaal15• 14 years ago

My point is why give free food at all?

If we help boost agriculture productivity and work on our economy most people will be able to buy food.

We must avoid giving Freebies. Giving away things for free/subsidy is the root cause of the problem.

noobplusplus4• 14 years ago

where were you till date. World has missed you, so how can you take your opinions further into actions? Or was this a thought bubble which came and went away?

EliRivers5• 14 years ago

How is that possibly the root cause of the problem? Right now, there IS enough food to feed these people; it's being stolen before they get it.

"My point is why give free food at all?"

Because these people are starving? Is that not a good reason?

smcl• 14 years ago

You've read through the entire article which indicates huge levels of corruption, and your conclusion is simply "Giving away things for free/subsidy is the root cause of the problem"?

pessimist3• 14 years ago

Perhaps, but I should note that India has historically suffered from highly inconsistent monsoons which have lead to famines, as recently as the 1960s. The failure of those monsoons lead to the creation of a PDS system.

Mvandenbergh• 14 years ago

That sounds great in theory, but it will take decades to make significant improvements in agricultural productivity (mostly for political reasons) and preventing mass starvation in the mean time is also important.

pessimist3• 14 years ago

I presume you live or have lived in India? In that case, consider yourself that the people targeted for this earn less than Rs. 25 per day - that is the official poverty line in India. Please consider yourself what you would be able to afford to buy and eat and that price. For yourself and 2 children. If you live in India please attempt to go to a store and buy food for the same price and see what you get.

Thanks!

intended14• 14 years ago

This is a question that requires more than a HN post to answer.

In broad outlines though

1) On the one hand this is our social safety net, and the floor to ensure that farmers are guaranteed a floor price for their efforts

2) We HAVE boosted agricultural productivity, which is why we have stocks which are now rotting.

3) We are stuck (edit: Didn't finish this point) with the legacies of our past. Which include our own step backwards in the 1960s.

4) > We must avoid giving Freebies. Giving away things for free/subsidy is the root cause of the problem.

The food isn't free. Its at a nominal subsidized rate.

The poverty line is about 32 rs a day. This system acts as a social safety net, while also at the same time ensuring a floor price for agricultural produce.

NREGA, a right to work act; may well be digging holes to fill holes. Yet it also is working to support a minimum wage across the country.

Can they be scrapped? Yeah.

Will it be good for India? No, it will likely be a disaster.

The transition from an inefficient, old school system to a modern system will immediately close out entire generations from the economy. No amount of education and retraining will close that gap.

Expect a gradual transition, as alternatives to western systems are dreamt up which work in an Indian context. Some of them are redundant, but are what people will swallow and accept.

-----------------

Other fun stuff:

Heck forget freebies, you should check out the reverse taxation mechanism that recently got introduced and is applicable from mid year.

The larger firms now are responsible for collecting the taxes they pay for obtaining services! If you work for a large firm and rent a car, if the final bill contains service tax, you are now obligated to pay that service tax to the government separately.

Why? Because the govt knows it can't go after the unorganized sector directly. So they make it inimical for the un-organized sector to remain disorganized.

MNCs will transfer their work to companies like Hertz, or other rent-a-car companies and so on.

Smaller firms will have to register and become compliant to survive.

Widening the tax net, and increase compliance.

At the expense of the more established firms.

Bizarre? Yeah, its par for the course.

----------------------- Side note:

2 MBA students actually tried to live at 100 Rs/day and then Rs 32 a day. At the 32 mark, they said travel was out of the question because the calorific/time effort required to move that distance to get to a bus station would have curtailed other equally important activities. (http://rs100aday.com/about/)

if_else• 14 years ago

because giving freebies makes people feel good. There are two parts of problems: one is to make people satisfied that they are helping others; another is to help others.

king_jester2• 14 years ago

I don't understand this mentality. Even the most developed countries have problems with people going hungry for a variety of reasons. Why shouldn't food be free? Why is it that you must pay to eat? Reducing basic human requirements to dependency on economies and money will always leave some people out. To say that food should not be free is to say that you value wealth and economy over people's lives. In fact, as technology makes it easier to produce more food, we should be using that abundance to provide food to anyone that wants it.

deepGem• 14 years ago

We cannot boost agricultural productivity with the current mono/dual crop culture, in a country like India. That's because there's very little 'new' land available for agriculture.

So you have to boost the yield in the existing land and even that doesn't scale really well.

To solve the food problem, we should start eating animals that reproduce really fast, pigs and rodents :), no matter how disgusting it is, to even think about.

lolcraft• 14 years ago

I can guess from where this sort of, seeing the market as a moralistic play, comes from. Macroeconomics can, via some stretching of the perfect-markets hypothesis, be transformed into this almost-Calvinist cosmology, where the virtuous labourers will be blessed with an eventual retirement, and the sinful free-loaders will be punished with the sin of contentment. I guess you worked hard all your life, too. It's the classic "I think I made it without help so fuck everyone else", plus some missionary fervour, Saint Theresa style: "don't give them free stuff! They must earn it or else they won't see the light!".

First, nobody can pull ten million jobs from their ass. Like, what the fuck do you propose they work on? Should we hire ten or twenty Indians to make us sandwiches that we won't eat? To farm more food that nobody will eat? There's simply not enough demand for labour today. If those people that were starving today were instead fairly rich, and could buy something, yeah, sure, there would be more demand for that labour that could create that something.

Second, we are talking about, like, giving them food. It's not like the developed world sat and decided to give each beggar a Mercedes. Apparently you think barely feeding them for a while will turn them into lazy asses without no ambitions such as, I don't know, an apartment, a car, a 40" TV screen and two or three kids. Maybe so. I don't see how it follows.

Retric3• 14 years ago

World GDP is ~70 trillion. Cost of feeding everyone in the world a healthy diet for 1 year = ~2.5 trillion. Or 3.5% of world GDP to feed everyone on the planet, hmm that may or may not be worth it but food is hardly the backbone of the world economy.

droob• 14 years ago

"LIVIN' THE GOOD LIFE, CHUMPS, sittin' here on this dirt floor at subsistence level. GOT IT MADE."

brown9-2• 14 years ago

Because it takes years if not decades to improve agriculture and the economy, and people are starving today.

bicknergseng• 14 years ago

Seems to me like it works if implemented correctly, and that corruption and poor implementation are the root causes.

The notion that providing essential services and goods like education, healthcare, and food somehow weakens a society or an economy needs to be squashed so that our global society can focus on how to accomplish those basic tasks.

mikeash5• 14 years ago

> If we help boost agriculture productivity and work on our economy most people will be able to buy food.

"Most people" simply isn't good enough.

Free markets generally work great for items that are not necessities. Efficiency, variety, and innovation is incentivized. But you always end up with some people who can't afford the items. If they're not a necessity, that's perfectly fine. But food is a necessity, and always having some people who can't afford food is not acceptable.

rayiner3• 14 years ago

> If we help boost agriculture productivity and work on our economy most people will be able to buy food.

[Citation needed]

nayanga• 14 years ago

When somebody is ill or weak why do give him/her medicine let body recover by itself, may not work most of the time and it will become severe. The whole idea of helping somebody is to recover from that state.

rmk• 14 years ago

Are you aware that people are dying for lack of food in India? Food is a basic need. Denying food to starving people and letting it rot does not help boost agricultural productivity or help people 'work on our economy'.

kamaal15• 14 years ago

My boss once told me fix the cause, not the effect.

Free food subsidies are really doomed for failure. This is in part a lack of long term solutions to these problems. Around 12-15 years back in India everybody had something called 'Ration card'. Its there today too, but back then you were eligible for rations at subsidized prices, I remember standing in long queues outside ration shops for wheat, rice, oil, sugar and kerosene. Needless to say these schemes were a legacy of the communist set up that India had for a long time. Realizing that this is not likely to scale. The government now issued new cards called 'BPL cards'(BPL- Below poverty line). That means this wasn't even for the poor, this was for the poorest among the poor. This is failing too. There are also other food schemes, in my state Karnataka, kids in government schools get mid day meals called 'Akshaya Patra'. Which is largely bad food served. Often contracted to some guy who pays the highest bribe. The food is generally unhygienic and lacks nutrition. I think by now everybody must know these free food schemes are a big failure.

The problem is India has huge inefficiencies in agriculture. The farming framework is massively unproductive. There are many reasons for this. Firstly the methods themselves belong to old stone age. Many farmers in villages farm with cows and bulls. Fertilizers/insecticides/pesticides are abused to the core to boost production. Irrigation isn't figured out yet. There are some major dams, but irrigation infrastructure is just totally absent. Droughts and floods are common. We either don't have water when we need it or there is simply too much water and we don't what to do about it. Farming land is subject to division through inheritance.

Apart from this the distribution is broken. Tons of grain rots because its not shipped and transported. Middle men act as a parasites in entire food-supply chain and add no value driving the end consumer prices high.

There are various experiments carried out especially forming communities in villages to encourage building local reservoirs and other efficient farming methods. But this will take a long time.

The political parties are dead opposed to FDI's in retail and farming. There by technology inflow from outside is limited. All this for vote bank politics.

Basically India is reeling under effects of its communist past and is held back because of inefficiencies of its political system combined sum total ignorance among the farmers.

So its not just corruption there are train of issues that result in these sort of problems.

kshatrea• 14 years ago

In India, there are several levels of bureaucracy that are involved. The main layer is called the Public Distribution System (PDS), whereby people are issued ration cards and allowed to purchase a certain amount of food at subsidized prices, or in poor families, given it for free. There is a colossal amount of corruption and theft; people simply report grains as sold and sell it on the black market. Due to the immense number of small traders and grocers who take cash and sell stuff without receipts, there are no taxes paid on this, and so everyone involved makes a profit, except for those whom this is supposed to benefit. Also, the sole source of storage are government granaries & silos, where a lot of food has either been found to have rotted, or been stolen. While people on HN are busy reading all the time about various Indian inefficiencies, corruptions and crimes, let us not forget that India's history is a socialist one (and like all socialist economies, the inefficiencies are built into the system - look at Venezuela/Cuba/Argentina/Hungary etc. today), and it is only in the last 20 years that there has been some liberalization and the Indian entrepreneur's spirit has been allowed to flourish. As you can see from all these headlines, there is still a long way to go for free market reforms. There are several sectors like the agricultural sector, energy sector and construction sector, where reforms would help a lot.

zizee2• 14 years ago

Corruption, above all else, is the biggest thing holding humanity back, but I wonder if it is possible to cleanse corruption from a society where it is so deeply ingrained?

Are there any good examples of a really corrupt society successfully making the transition to an relatively uncorrupted state?

eckyptang• 14 years ago

It would be nice but it's part of human nature. It's simply a form of survival. You'd need an external non human entity to prevent it, which inevitably leads to bad science fiction stories being recalled...

yk• 14 years ago

I would argue that the transition from feudal societies to modern nations is a example for such an transition. On a much shorter timescale, there seems to be quite some variability in corruption[1]. And connecting the plot lines, there seems no show stopper at any value of this corruption metric, so there seems to be no problem in principle to move from a very corrupt society to a uncorrupt one on a timescale of 20 years.

Playing a bit further with the data, the correlation between corruption and GDP is rather impressive [2].

[1] Google public data explorer link: http://bit.ly/PQ12bj

[2] Again Google: http://bit.ly/Ttp24m

zizee2• 14 years ago

Agreed, I was thinking that as well. I wonder if the same factors in transforming those societies all those years ago could be used in the modern world? Or has the world changed so much since then that the same factors could no longer apply?

Things like much larger populations, greater mobility and communications may make the solution to corruption a lot different today than what worked in the past.

noobplusplus4• 14 years ago

How are hackers supposed to hack it off? I don't understand why such news travels to the top of HN. In case no one has a soln. for it, why write big posts? IF you gotta do something go and do it, i am pretty sure, the ones who are most concerned won't be hanging around here. This seems to me OT.

kamaal15• 14 years ago

HN is a place people across the world meet.

Its a place to learn and know interesting perspectives. Just as there have been discussion on inefficiencies of agriculture in the US, fights in McDonalds over glasses and other US political stuff things like this get discussed.

It gives a perspective to people on poverty in the world and how things are else where beyond your cubicle and first world countries.

noobplusplus4• 14 years ago

OMG! i didn't know that. Thanks for enlightening me. But i along with other fellow geeks would want to see more tech stuff than why people have got used to corruption and talks about protests etc.

biot2• 14 years ago

According to PG's guidelines, the criteria roughly boils down to whether or not something gratifies your intellectual curiosity. Shall we flood HN with stories of corruption in the Congo, Thailand, Haiti, Russia, Egypt, and so on? Maybe HN should have a weekly feature of poverty-stricken AIDS victims in various countries in Africa? Perhaps title this weekly feature "Poverty Perspectives Beyond the Cubicle"?

Stories like these, while tragic, are not new phenomena. Unless one is naive, one should already know that the world is full of corruption and that there isn't anything particularly novel about this brand of corruption. On the other hand, a story about cleverly planted subtle bugs in a high-frequency trading algorithm would make for a great HN story involving corruption since the details would be intellectually gratifying. But plain old selling of supplies meant for the poor? That's been going on forever. How is your intellect gratified by hearing about yet one more case?

tathagata• 14 years ago

Technology has a very direct effect on corruption, and hackers and entrepreneurs are squashing corruption everywhere.

See [1]. From the abstract - "We provide empirical evidence that strongly shows that technology-induced private sector development is associated with a decline in aggregate corruption.".

Also see [2]. From the abstract - "The paper suggests that societies that continually stay open to productivity-enhancing activities will eventually enter a takeoff stage of anti-corruption efforts..."

[1] Corruption and Technology-Induced Private Sector Development. www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2006/wp06198.pdf

[2] Corruption and Technological Progress. www2.econ.osaka-u.ac.jp/coe/dp/dp_no.14.pdf

lionhearted• 14 years ago

Serious question --

Stories like this come out of India fairly often.

How come the government hasn't been overthrown yet?

Or severe riots, insurrections, etc?

Seems like that would happen elsewhere, no?

kamaal15• 14 years ago

It happens in India too. There are massive anti-corruption movements in progress. There are also riots, everything exists as else where.

Its just that people by now are so used to all these problems so many of them sort of just go by it.

noobplusplus4• 14 years ago

Unlike elsewhere protests are peaceful. People sit for fast, and that allows the govt. to easily pass away. The whole political system is full of such people!

aniket_ray2• 14 years ago

I'd say apathy of the masses is the biggest reason that any of the things you mention haven't happened.

In this article, for instance, only the poorest of the poor are truly starving and the vast majority just doesn't care enough to protest. While the middle classes are too busy with their own lives, the poorest and most disadvantaged people are too busy trying to eke out a basic living to actually protest about it.

Let me try to list some reasons as to why.

India has no real opposition party in the centre or most of the states. Most ruling parties end up having uncontrolled power.

Corruption has become so pervasive in the Indian pillars of governance that we don't really have a Law & Order System anymore. The Police are corrupt and the judicial system is corrupt. Criminals thrive, as long as they have money.

Failure of the Law & Order system encourages corruption in the political class. The times that an opposition party does become a bit powerful, they end up being just as corrupt as the ruling party. Most Indian election candidates use the support of various mafia and unscrupulous businessmen to win elections. Once they win this way, they need to help such people now that they are in power.

Over a period of time, these issues have become so pervasive in the Indian system that today the educated and the middle classes stay away from politics. They live in their own laissez-faire life with private utilities, security and medicine. They pay their taxes but don't expect much from the government in return as long as the government doesn't interfere or hinder them.

The powerful media is too busy and is rarely anti-government because government advertising forms a big part of their revenues. So they don't carry such stories for long. The media has their own pressures since they have to keep circulations high by keeping the prices virtually free.

A section of the civil society had been trying to hold anti-corruption protests in recent times. They started with a lot of support but soon the media lost interest in them and nobody really pays any attention to their rallies anymore.

Now for all these reasons, the middle classes are mostly apathetic to the plight of the poor or the fact that the rich are exploiting the nation.

kamaal15• 14 years ago

>>In this article, for instance, only the poorest of the poor are truly starving and the vast majority just doesn't care enough to protest. While the middle classes are too busy with their own lives, the poorest and most disadvantaged people are too busy trying to eke out a basic living to actually protest about it.

Oh, common please stop this.

If the poor worried about themselves, they will no longer be poor. Expecting other protest for you, earn for you, farm for you is a thing of the communist past.

Nobody is going to come and do it for them.

potatolicious3• 14 years ago

> "How come the government hasn't been overthrown yet?"

The same reason why the Chinese government still exists: hope and the middle class. There is a growing demographic of middle class people whose fortunes improve every year due to a prospering economy. This growth has not really trickled down into the lower classes, but it doesn't matter - so long as the middle class does well, stability exists. Likewise, so long as there is hope for the poor to join the burgeoning middle class, stability exists.

This, coincidentally, is also the greatest challenge facing China. Inevitably the explosive growth will slow down, and there will be no more hope for social mobility. At that point everything is going to go to shit.

> "Or severe riots, insurrections, etc?"

I can't speak for India, but in China there are. You just don't really hear about them because the government has a very tight lid on things, and they are such regular occurrences that they would hardly get much airtime in the West, even if journalists had unfettered access.

eplanit• 14 years ago

No disrespect to the people described in the article, but how is this relevant on HN?

anovikov6• 14 years ago

No 'public distribution system' can ever fix any of problems society faces. It just makes government bigger, in the end making things worse. Maybe it's okay in big cities where you give free food to avoid people killing for it, i.e. suppressing crime, but works only in conjunction with strong law enforcement. Nobody is going to become a better/more productive person because (s)he received free food for years.

lilsunnybee3• 14 years ago

Everyone has received free food for years: it's called childhood. Saying that just because someone has their most basic needs provided for they won't strive for a better life is preposterous.

simula67• 14 years ago

First of let me say that I am from India. I have been watching the number of (negative) political posts regarding India on HN for quite some time now[1]

What are the benefits and costs of discussing these issues here on HN?

Some benefits: 1. It gives rise to a discussion which hopefully translates to solutions and actions for future 2. It is a nice break from discussing technology ( ?? ) Some costs: 1. HN being an international forum, it gives an idea that India is choke full of problems that nothing good will come out of India [2]. No wonder latest discussion on India's Mars vision was derided along the lines of "Get food to your people first" 2. It is not of interest to a large number of hackers 3. It is a fertile ground for armchair theorizing.

I am of the opinion these stories should be flagged.

[1]http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=ind... [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias

praj_na• 14 years ago

I concur with [3]. This was also a front page article on reddit which is probably a better suited place for such discussions

genwin18• 14 years ago

Such stories shouldn't be flagged according to the submission guidelines.

auser678• 14 years ago

This makes me so angry and sad. I see such corruption happening everyday. Uttar Pradesh is a state of 200 million people and one of the most backward and corrupt states.It is another fact that Uttar Pradesh due to the sheer number produces some of the best talent in India and the world. Most of these people migrate out of Lucknow and UP. I wish more of them would come back and try to build companies so that more jobs are created. We just watch from far and lament but do nothing about it. We have made a small start by being based here, and hope we can make an impact.

huntesh• 14 years ago

thanks to the contention arising due to equitable distribution of food among the states, the grains rots in the godowns again.

another major disadvantage of democracy.

ycycyc• 14 years ago

Does anyone keep in perspective that the biggest achievement of independent India is avoiding famines thanks partly to the help of the "rotten" PDS?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famines_in_India

I think this article follows a pattern of op-eds in India: the private sector eyes a plump public-sector undertaking. Suddenly there is a series of articles often pointing at the weakest link in the chain - Uttar Pradesh or Bihar is always there to be poster boys of decay, the articles never focus on functional systems in the south, like Kerala or TamilNadu - and then libertarians chime in on how any kind of sharing/caring/government is bad. Lo and behold, due to the weight of public opinion, the sector is sold off - classic crony capitalism.

patio11• 14 years ago

If you can buy a Pepsi in every village in India, why can’t the government get us our rations?

This is a quote for the ages.

kamaal15• 14 years ago

This actually speaks volumes of the true nature of the problem.

The problem is distribution and affordability.

You can buy Pepsi for ten rupees, and the fact that its everywhere talks a lot of Pepsi's distribution model.

ramsetal• 14 years ago

this is the real story that really depress me!

j452• 14 years ago

I have read that there is no rule of law in India, meaning corruption from top to bottom so deep that the average person is living a more and more miserable life.

j452• 14 years ago

Appreciate the downmod, would appreciate a reason/discussion about the above even more

npguy• 14 years ago

I am surprised why nobody has questioned the harsh language in the title. Read it again - Poor starve as politicians Steal - "Steal"?

yarrel2• 14 years ago

The market wants people to die.

All we can do is help it decide how many.

Apparently.

Poor in India Starve as Politicians Steal $14.5 Billion of Food

Related Stories