The manifesto of the Congress party promised the enactment of a Right to Food Act, if the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was voted back to power. A preliminary shape of such an Act has emerged in what was reported in the media as the very first letter from Congress president Sonia Gandhi to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The UPA government hopes to repeat through the passage of this Act what it had achieved during its last term through the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA)—a vision for more inclusive governance.
Indranil Bhoumik / Mint
At the heart of the idea of the right to food is a very simple premise. That no citizen of a country should go hungry, and that each citizen should at all times have physical access to, or the means to acquire, adequate nutritious food. It is time India delivered on this.
Few countries in the world can claim to have achieved this fully, and, till recently, fewer still have legislated it. The reasons for this are not difficult to comprehend. Only a handful of developed countries have the resources and the social commitment to welfarism to make this happen.
Some countries, such as the US, which actually have the resources to achieve the goal of a country free from hunger, do not legislate it. To them, such socio-economic rights are seen as a throwback to the Cold War, when the international debates between the socialist block and the US were on the superiority of civil and political rights over socio-economic rights.
But the idea of nation states guaranteeing citizens the right to food is not a new one. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by all United Nations member states in 1948, lists among a state’s obligation the right to food.
Closer home, article 21 of the Constitution, which provides a fundamental right to life and personal liberty, has been repeatedly interpreted by the Supreme Court as enshrining within it the right to food. Article 47 obliges the Indian state to raise the standard of nutrition of its people.
Despite this, India continues to have one of the worst track records globally, as far as the commitment to tackle hunger and malnutrition is concerned. The last round of the National Family Health Survey in 2006 confirmed that the child malnutrition rate in India is 46%, almost double that of sub-Saharan Africa. India, the world’s second fastest growing economy, ranks 66th among the 88 countries surveyed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (Ifpri) in the Global Hunger Index (2008), below Sudan, Nigeria and Cameroon, and slightly above Bangladesh.