So goes a Press Information Bureau (PIB) note issued on 29 November, 2023: “The Cabinet led by Prime Minister has decided that the Central government will provide free food grains to about 81.35 crore beneficiaries under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY) for a period of five years with effect from 1st January, 2024… This is a historic decision that places PMGKAY amongst the World’s biggest social welfare schemes aimed at ensuring food and nutrition security for 81.35 crore persons, at an estimated cost of Rs. 11.80 lakh crore over a 5-year period… The decision reflects the strong commitment of Hon. PM Shri Narendra Modi towards efficient and targeted welfare through fulfilment of basic food and nutrition requirements of the population. Ensuring food security at this scale during Amrit Kaal would play a pivotal role in dedicating efforts towards building an aspirational and developed India.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had suo motto proclaimed this largesse at an election rally on November 4 this year. “Today, I want to tell the poor brothers and sisters of the country from the land of Durg (Chhattisgarh) that I have decided that the BJP government will now extend the PMGKAY providing free ration to 80 crore poor people of the country for the next five years.” He claimed that he himself came from a poor family and he considers poor as the “biggest caste [group] in the country.”
The scheme involves free supply of five kg of food grains per month to over 810 million people who account for three-fourths of the country’s rural and half of the urban population. The scheme was initiated by the Manmohan Singh government in 2013 under the National Food Security Act to provide subsidised food-grains to the poor. It has gone through changes since and the Modi government introduced the PMGKAY in 2020 as a free ration entitlement scheme.
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It was extended for one year in December 2020 as the country was recovering from the Covid pandemic and has been kept going with short extensions since. It is this scheme which is now being extended by five more years confirming the fact that majority of Indians are so poor that they cannot even afford to buy food, which is a basic necessity.
This deep deprivation has accelerated during the NDA regime headed by Modi if one goes by the Gallup World Poll survey for India focusing on lack of money to buy food. The period covered in the study is 2018 to 2021. About 40.2% of respondents in the survey reported not having enough money for food in 2018. This rose to 48% in 2021. In 2023 it seemed to have climbed up further compelling the prime minister to extend the ‘free-ration’ scheme to over half of India’s population for five more years.
This abject poverty is further evidenced by the 2023 Global Hunger Index (GHI), wherein India ranks 111th out of the 125 countries. With a score of 28.7 in the 2023 GHI, India has a level of hunger that is serious. GHI is a peer-reviewed report, published on an annual basis by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe. The GHI is a tool designed to comprehensively measure and track hunger at global, regional, and national levels, reflecting multiple dimensions of hunger over time.
The report aims to raise awareness and understanding of the struggle against hunger, provide a way to compare levels of hunger between countries and regions, and call attention to those areas of the world where hunger levels are highest and where the need for additional efforts to eliminate hunger is greatest.
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What is distressing is that India’s low-income levels and deprivation is accompanied by it being among the most inequitable countries in the world with the richest 1% owning more than 40% of the country’s total wealth, while the bottom half of the population together share just 3%. Reality is that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer.
It is in this canvas that a near ten-fold increase in the size of the economy and per-capita GDP is being projected to be achieved in the next 25 years. NITI Aayog recently announced the draft of the vision document ‘Viksit Bharat @ 2047’ to make India a $30 trillion economy by 2047 with a per capita GDP of $17,590 would be ready by December, 2023. America’s Boston Consulting Group would be readying this document in consultation with “business tycoons and corporate honchos” including Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani.
NITI Aayog CEO BVR Subrahmanyam said that ten sectoral groups of secretaries from various ministries created around themes including infrastructure, welfare, commerce and industry, technology, and governance have each prepared a vision document in a process that lasted nearly two years.
It is claimed that the Indian economy is currently the world’s fifth largest, with a size of $3.75 trillion. The annual per-capita income, as per the government data, stood at ₹98,374 in 2022-23 i.e., $1,183. Atanu Chakraborty, the chairman of HDFC Bank expects the Indian economy to become the third largest in the next four years and reach the $30 trillion-mark by 2050, with the per-capita income soaring to $21,000 by then.
Business tycoon Gautam Adani is more assertive and chips in with this gem, “Following independence, it took us 58 years to get to our first trillion dollars of GDP, 12 years to get to the next trillion and just 5 years for the third trillion. I anticipate that within the next decade, India will start adding a trillion dollars to its GDP every 18 months. This puts us on track to be a $25-$30 trillion economy by 2050 and drive India’s stock market capitalisation to over $40 trillion.” And he adds to good measure, “Our country is now the most exciting land of opportunities” Indeed, he knows better!
To realise this dream NITI Aayog’s Subrahmanyam advocates drastic changes, “..2047 will be a very different India. It will be highly urbanised. Where we live, the way we move, the kind of jobs we do, what we eat–things are going to change massively by that time… The government needs radical restructuring, both horizontally and vertically, such that the lower levels of government be entirely tasked with implementation so that senior officials can spend more time ideating.”
But pray, what is the “development model” to achieve this mammoth task? Predatory or participatory? In December of 2020, Subrahmanyam’s illustrious predecessor Amitabh Kant laid bare an oligarchic-cum-monopolistic model of promoting select champions, “… For the first time in India a government has thought big in terms of size and scale and said we want to produce global champions. Nobody had the political will and the courage to say that we want to support five companies who want to be global champions.” As the Adani story unfolds, we see this model being practiced with vengeance.
Under this model while hunger and extreme inequality persists the bulk of the $30 trillion will go to one to two percent of the population and India’s economy would look like “the drunken stunted dog” as described in Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari’s book Churning the Earth: “Imagine a puppy which is fed a special kind of diet which distorts his growth so that one of his legs grows astonishingly fast, while the other three get stunted to various degrees. Now imagine that the puppy grows into a dog of sorts, gets drunk and begin to spin around the house in ecstasy.”
I wonder whether this is the fate of ‘New India’ in ‘Amrit Kaal’ which the PIB note is talking about.
M.G. Devasahayam is a former Army and IAS officer.
