Amartya Sen,
as befits a Nobel laureate, has often produced careful calculations to
throw light on dark situations, such as the number of deaths caused by
Mao's Great Leap Forward in China. So, it was astonishing to hear him
say on a recent TV programme that the delay in passing the Food Security Bill was causing 1,000 deaths per week (equal to 52,000 per year).This was not based on any known methodology — he simply plucked the figure out of the air and threw it at the audience. This startled a fellow participant, Arvind Panagariya, who let fly in a subsequent interview. "I often say in jest that serious economists are handicapped in policy debates in India because their opponents feel entitled not only to their arguments but their own facts as well! And here I was facing the same from Sen!
"Deaths often have multiple causes. In the case of children, a partial list includes premature births, low birth weight, infections, congenital diseases, accidents, poor water quality, poor medical assistance and poor diet. I am mystified how Sen can attribute a precise number of child deaths to the absence of a policy that has not been in place for a single day, a policy that is subject to so many lapses and leakages along the implementation chain, whose impact critically depends on how the beneficiaries adjust their consumption in response to it, and which can, after all, potentially impact only calorie intake and not other causes of death."
Sen had said a few days earlier that delays in the Food Security Bill's passage could cause deaths, but this seemed not to attract public attention. "To capture people's attention, you have to have a number," Sen declared.
And so, he duly produced a number — 1,000 deaths a week — simply to catch people's attention. Thus has a Nobel laureate become a pamphleteer, inventing figures like any populist politician.
Scathing Comment
He certainly caught the media's attention, but not in the manner he expected. Rather, he attracted much scathing comment. For instance, a news portal said, "It is becoming increasingly difficult to retain respect for Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. He seems to surface in the media every time the UPA government is about to legislate its pet follies, providing intellectual succour to mindless spending and corruption."
As for calculating the impact of the Bill, a columnist in a business newspaper has made an attempt. He says implementing the Bill will cost around Rs 6,00,000 crore over three years, of which leakages will be 40-50%, or up to Rs 3,00,000 crore.
The adverse consequences of such mismanagement of government finances could kill rather than save lives. One survey in eastern UP by Kripa Shankar revealed, shockingly, that not a single family among all those surveyed got anything from ration shops. One shop owner defended himself saying he had to pay bribes to FCI staff and grain transporters. So, given the thin official margin allowed for PDS sales, he said he had no option but to sell most of the grain in the open market!
Recently, states like Tamil Nadu and Chhattisgarh have reduced leakages substantially. This is heartening. But in these states, the Food Security Bill will have no impact at all. Why? Well, the Bill provides for 5 kg of wheat or rice per eligible person at Rs 2 and Rs 3 respectively per kilo. However, many states — Tamil Nadu, Kerala, AP, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha — already provide grain at Rs 1-3 per kilo using state-level subsidies.
In such states, the central Bill will not reduce the price to the consumer at all: it will just reduce the state's own food subsidy, freeing state governments to divert supposed food security money to anything they like.
Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/swaminathan-s-a-aiyar/amartya-sen-wrong-in-his-claim-that-delay-in-food-bill-killing-a-thousand-every-week/articleshow/20191496.cms
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