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Incidentally, the problematic public distribution system is solved in parts of India, most notably the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu - http://www.thehindu

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 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.

kamaal 14y 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.
- noobplusplus 14y 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?
- EliRivers 14y 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?
  - kamaal 14y ago
    Free stuff is considered as doing a favor. Besides India is such a big country that monitoring these things is nearly impossible. With corruption rampant and lack of accountability, these schemes are designed to fail from their very inception. What these people need is not food, may be they need it at the moment. But what these people need is a way to make a decent living, which nobody shows them how to- And often we come back and talk about hunger.
    - EliRivers 14y ago
      "Besides India is such a big country that monitoring these things is nearly impossible." I disagree very strongly. Monitoring food distribution scales really well. You add monitors. That's it. If you want concrete examples of effectively monitoring things over large areas I can provide some. If the monitors themselves are corrupt then the problem is not that somehow monitoring big things is impossible. The problem is corruption. Edit: For sillysaurus, because he asked. Walmart effectively monitors food distribution over the US. Power companies effectively monitor the power grids over large areas. Electoral commissions (in some countries) effectively monitor elections over large areas.
      - sillysaurus 14y ago
        What are some concrete examples of effectively monitoring things over large areas?
      - stickfigure 14y ago
        I am not convinced that this makes a useful point. "The problem is corruption" - sure. But adding monitors doesn't seem to address that issue; actually, adding bureaucrats and regulators (which India has in abundance) seems to exacerbate the problem by establishing petty fiefdoms. How many bribes do you have to pay to open a business? Short of a massive cultural shift (the kind that only happens when millions of people get murdered), Indian society is what it is. Think of this as a game theory problem - you can't change the players, you can only change the rules of the game, and even that with only limited authority. What approach will accomplish the desired goals? As an outsider, I get the feeling that an awful lot of Indian public policy starts with the assumption that humans are dutiful and honest. That seems like a problem.
  - anovikov 14y ago
    "being stolen before they get it" - nonsense! 1) There is an X amount of food and Y number of people in India. 2) Someone is eating that food (let's assume nothing gets thrown out/rots because of corruption: someone who steals food eventually sells it and it gets eaten, not trashed) Meaning: corruption does not change the supply and demand, so it doesn't impact the prices (total money that is charged for the food in the country). It only changes the hands which get the money. Nobody starves because of the food getting stolen unless, again, the stolen food is either trashed or ends up exported.
    - intended 14y ago
      >. 2) Someone is eating that food (let's assume nothing gets thrown out/rots because of corruption: someone who steals food eventually sells it and it gets eaten, not trashed) That is a simplification. It is both being stolen and it is rotting. Even the article states that there is tons of food that is rotting/wasting away. If it doesn't mention it, I can give examples of food stock being wasted from as long back as, I think 1970-1980. Also - Corruption DOES shift the supply curve so "corruption does not change supply and demand" is only true in the land of platonic ideals.
      - kamaal 14y ago
        I think his point is stealing food redirects it those who need it and can afford it. So the problem shifts from corruption to affordability. The free food program exists because they can't afford it. If we can fix the affordability problem, there won't be a need for a free food program and there by corruption related to it won't exist. These people need to get jobs. But since they don't have it. You may by all means fix corruption and give them free food, but they will hungry again in the next six months. Where will you get free food from, then and till when?
        intended 14y ago
        It redirects food to people who have the buying power. IIRC Mr. A. Sen won the nobel for showing that people starved not because of lack of food, but because of lack of purchasing power. The wiki page suggests that his findings are being debated though, to be fair. My google foo is also a bit literal at the moment, and I wasn't able to produce a result which explained what he won his nobel for.
  - hashpipe 14y ago
    +100 for the reason !
  - anamax 14y ago
    > Because these people are starving? Is that not a good reason? Probably not. (1) Many of them aren't starving. (The system covers other people, who tend to crowd-out the actual starving.) (2) The relevant question is "why are they starving". Feeding them typically solves the wrong problem and guarantees that you continue to have starving people. (3) Such programs tend to reduce local food production, leading to more starving. The law of unintended consequences doesn't care how good your intentions are. .
    - EliRivers 14y ago
      (2) If you do not feed starving people you then have dead people. This is the end state we wish to avoid. Setting up a system so that you do not need to keep feeding them yourself is a good idea. It does not negate the need to feed them now to avoid them being dead.
      - anamax 14y ago
        > If you do not feed starving people you then have dead people. There are going to be dead people no matter what you do. However, we can affect how many dead people there are. My goal is to minimize the number of dead&starving people. Your strategy produces more dead&starving people than my strategy. What's your goal? I know that you think that "now" is different, but it isn't. Applying your strategy in the past produced starving people. Why should we keep doing that? ("this time" isn't different.) I forgot another point, such programs always result in corruption which steals food money from poor people and gives it to rich ones. Why do you support that? (You don't get to point to the good that would supposedly happen if such corruption didn't happen. It does, so if you support the programs, you're willing to accept the corruption and its consequences.) I don't think that your desire to feel good about yourself justifies policies that are as harmful as yours are.
        intended 14y ago
        To quote another post earlier in this thread > And this is actually a salient point - subsidy and direct-aid programs like this are never meant as a permanent solution to anything. Nobody is dumb enough to believe this. These programs buy time to find a systemic solution - because it's better to keep these people hobbling along while we try to fix the larger systemic issues that perpetuate their poverty, than to simply let them all die while we tinker with the knobs and switches.
  - genwin 14y ago
    > Because these people are starving? Is that not a good reason? Certainly not, if/when it's true that giving the free food causes more people to starve in the long run. Less misery is better than more misery, as sad as any misery is.
    - EliRivers 14y ago
      By this logic, the humane thing to do now is to create a super-virus that kills all humanity. No more human misery, ever. Thanks for that. :)
      - genwin 14y ago
        No, that would be more misery. The least amount of misery is the fewest deaths.
- smcl 14y 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"?
  - kamaal 14y ago
    Because I know corruption is one of the many many issues that resulted in this problem and not the only thing responsible for it. If you were to fix corruption, may be they will be fed this season, but they will hungry in next 6 months. Corruption is happening inside this free food distribution program. But why do those people even need free food? Unfortunately this question is never asked. Those people don't have productive jobs to afford it. That is why we always keep hearing of these stories. Our focus must be to provide them jobs so that they can buy it, instead of making it a free stuff.
    - studentrob 14y ago
      of course, jobs are needed. #1 is food tho- if you are starving then you are unhealthy and not able to take care of yourself . some people are born into poverty and need more of a leg up in the beginning because if they make any mistakes they die. if we make mistakes, we have many legs to stand on, because we are very very privileged. have you ever given to charity or given anything away for free? or have you ever been given something for free?
    - lilsunnybee 14y ago
      If income is distributed too unequally, it is extremely common that there just aren't enough jobs to go around at any given time. A wealthy person only needs so many servants. Everyone else has needs too, but if they don't have money to throw around they can't stimulate the economy. The immediate problem here is corruption and a non-functioning law enforcement and court system. The pervasive root problem is actually that a fair amount of Indians don't have the disposable income to create enough jobs for everyone, or to provide for the sick, elderly, or disabled in their communities. And letting people die or suffer from malnutrition, whether they're productive or not, is just sick.
  - 14y ago
- pessimist 14y 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 14y 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.
  - kamaal 14y ago
    I agree with you on this. But the point is this hunger stories reappear after the aid exhausts out. Which means people are not put to work to afford it.
  - maheshs 14y ago
    There are always two way to solve the problem. In this case politician can solve this problem by implementation and execution of plan for increasing the productivity and increasing the jobs. Second plan is to feed them with free food. Second one is easy and give them quick votes, though its dangerous for poor people as well as country.
    - intended 14y ago
      Again, the food isn't free. It's drastically subsidized. The PDS system creates a floor price for agricultural produce, ensuring against the vagaries of the market. At th same time it distorts market prices. Given the inefficiency in the system, and it's lack of gearage which can transmit efficiency benefits to the bottom of the pyramid, the PDS system is an interim measure to help pull the bottom out of poverty.
- pessimist 14y 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!
  - kamaal 14y ago
    Hmmm, I actually come from a pretty poor financial background. What helped me rise is self esteem to never accept help and learn to be strong instead. In fact right from the beginning I've refused scholarships. I purposefully turned down the option of reservation for my engineering course though I was perfectly eligible for it. My dad always says if you let people be strong they will be strong. Let them be weak and they will be weak. What these people need is not free stuff and reservations. They just need to be shown how to be strong and work their way out of the problem.
    - vacri 14y ago
      Who will be showing them?
    - hashpipe 14y ago
      It's strange that you refused a scholarship - who knows where that money went (another needy student or another scam). Plus, turning down a reservation only means that you made sure that someone less deserving (via reservation) got an engineering seat over a more deserving one (a general student who otherwise would have ranked just enough to get admitted). While your intent is good, I think you are letting your ego do the talking - dishing out theories over practicals. Practicality beats the st out of theory any given day. Try telling the farmer who hasn't eaten for a week to stand up and be strong - I bet he can't stand (quite literally).
      - ams6110 14y ago
        Any time someone gives you something you then have to dance to their tune. Do it on your own and you call the shots.
- intended 14y 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/ http://rs100aday.com/about/)
  - kamaal 14y ago
    I agree with you in principle. But the point in discussion is why do people need to be provided food for free? Clearly if they are not able to buy for a real long time- This indicates they are not earning enough. So fixing that makes more sense than fixing problems in the free food program. Because if we fix the affordability issue we will not need the free food program at the first place. Yes the distribution system is broken. I think a step to fix that was tried- FDI in retail was good. Companies could buy directly from the farmers, eliminating middle men and the entire inefficient distribution cycle. But I and you know well the political opposition to those reforms.
- if_else 14y 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_jester 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
  - genwin 14y ago
    I think there's plenty of evidence that free food does more harm than good in the long run, outside of emergency situations that couldn't reasonably be planned for. In the long run millions of beggars wouldn't have been born in the first place if free food hadn't been available. (That's not to say that beggars are always caused by free food.) Humans aren't much different than ducks in this regard.
    - anu_gupta 14y ago
      > In the long run millions of beggars wouldn't have been born in the first place if free food hadn't been available. You're right, of course, because their parents would have starved to death. A civilised society does not allow its citizens to die of starvation. In the long run of course it would be preferable to not have to give out free food, but until there's a viable alternative, that's what a civilised country does.
- Retric 14y 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 14y ago
  "LIVIN' THE GOOD LIFE, CHUMPS, sittin' here on this dirt floor at subsistence level. GOT IT MADE."
- brown9-2 14y ago
  Because it takes years if not decades to improve agriculture and the economy, and people are starving today.
- bicknergseng 14y 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.
  - crusso 14y ago
    notion that providing essential services and goods like education, healthcare, and food I can see the benefit of free education. When you educate people, it has a multiplicative effect on the mobility of the individuals. Education has the ability to unlock a great deal of potential in each person which has a seemingly obvious benefit for the rest of the society. I would argue that giving completely free food and healthcare do weaken most societies. The problem is that there's an all-too-large portion of most societies that will avoid working if they can get basic necessities like food, healthcare, and housing met for free. Working is good for people. It gets them out of bed, gets them thinking, gives some people their only exercise, forces people to deal with others socially, and quite literally keeps some folks out of trouble that they'd otherwise get into if they were completely idle. I'm all for a safety net to keep people suffering from catastrophic health problems or temporary situations from dying/starving... but the notion that we should make "free food" a policy is just broken.
- mikeash 14y 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.
  - anamax 14y ago
    When's the last time a free market had a famine? How often do "not free" markets have famines? In the US, poor people are fat. They don't lack food. (They don't lack TVs, cars, or houses either.)
    - yarrel 14y ago
      How are the crops doing in the US this summer, btw?
      - anamax 14y ago
        > How are the crops doing in the US this summer, btw? Not particularly well. We'll have to reduce our exports and draw down some of our reserves. In other words, our poor people can continue to be fat, not starving. They might buy fewer TVs for a while or reduce the amount of processed calories to handle the extra cost. We can have several years of bad crops before we'll have a food shortage. Of course, it would help if we stopped using food for automobile fuel. (The brazilians would love to sell us methanol for less but they don't have an early presidential primary.)
    - mikeash 14y ago
      Famine isn't the issue. A famine is when there simply isn't enough food within a population. The issue at hand is when there's enough food that isn't well distributed, which is a completely different phenomenon.
      - 14y ago
- rayiner 14y ago
  > If we help boost agriculture productivity and work on our economy most people will be able to buy food. [Citation needed]
- nayanga 14y 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 14y 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'.

kamaal 14y 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.

noobplusplus 14y 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?
EliRivers 14y 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?
- kamaal 14y ago
  Free stuff is considered as doing a favor. Besides India is such a big country that monitoring these things is nearly impossible. With corruption rampant and lack of accountability, these schemes are designed to fail from their very inception. What these people need is not food, may be they need it at the moment. But what these people need is a way to make a decent living, which nobody shows them how to- And often we come back and talk about hunger.
  - EliRivers 14y ago
    "Besides India is such a big country that monitoring these things is nearly impossible." I disagree very strongly. Monitoring food distribution scales really well. You add monitors. That's it. If you want concrete examples of effectively monitoring things over large areas I can provide some. If the monitors themselves are corrupt then the problem is not that somehow monitoring big things is impossible. The problem is corruption. Edit: For sillysaurus, because he asked. Walmart effectively monitors food distribution over the US. Power companies effectively monitor the power grids over large areas. Electoral commissions (in some countries) effectively monitor elections over large areas.
    - sillysaurus 14y ago
      What are some concrete examples of effectively monitoring things over large areas?
    - stickfigure 14y ago
      I am not convinced that this makes a useful point. "The problem is corruption" - sure. But adding monitors doesn't seem to address that issue; actually, adding bureaucrats and regulators (which India has in abundance) seems to exacerbate the problem by establishing petty fiefdoms. How many bribes do you have to pay to open a business? Short of a massive cultural shift (the kind that only happens when millions of people get murdered), Indian society is what it is. Think of this as a game theory problem - you can't change the players, you can only change the rules of the game, and even that with only limited authority. What approach will accomplish the desired goals? As an outsider, I get the feeling that an awful lot of Indian public policy starts with the assumption that humans are dutiful and honest. That seems like a problem.
- anovikov 14y ago
  "being stolen before they get it" - nonsense! 1) There is an X amount of food and Y number of people in India. 2) Someone is eating that food (let's assume nothing gets thrown out/rots because of corruption: someone who steals food eventually sells it and it gets eaten, not trashed) Meaning: corruption does not change the supply and demand, so it doesn't impact the prices (total money that is charged for the food in the country). It only changes the hands which get the money. Nobody starves because of the food getting stolen unless, again, the stolen food is either trashed or ends up exported.
  - intended 14y ago
    >. 2) Someone is eating that food (let's assume nothing gets thrown out/rots because of corruption: someone who steals food eventually sells it and it gets eaten, not trashed) That is a simplification. It is both being stolen and it is rotting. Even the article states that there is tons of food that is rotting/wasting away. If it doesn't mention it, I can give examples of food stock being wasted from as long back as, I think 1970-1980. Also - Corruption DOES shift the supply curve so "corruption does not change supply and demand" is only true in the land of platonic ideals.
    - kamaal 14y ago
      I think his point is stealing food redirects it those who need it and can afford it. So the problem shifts from corruption to affordability. The free food program exists because they can't afford it. If we can fix the affordability problem, there won't be a need for a free food program and there by corruption related to it won't exist. These people need to get jobs. But since they don't have it. You may by all means fix corruption and give them free food, but they will hungry again in the next six months. Where will you get free food from, then and till when?
      - intended 14y ago
        It redirects food to people who have the buying power. IIRC Mr. A. Sen won the nobel for showing that people starved not because of lack of food, but because of lack of purchasing power. The wiki page suggests that his findings are being debated though, to be fair. My google foo is also a bit literal at the moment, and I wasn't able to produce a result which explained what he won his nobel for.
- hashpipe 14y ago
  +100 for the reason !
- anamax 14y ago
  > Because these people are starving? Is that not a good reason? Probably not. (1) Many of them aren't starving. (The system covers other people, who tend to crowd-out the actual starving.) (2) The relevant question is "why are they starving". Feeding them typically solves the wrong problem and guarantees that you continue to have starving people. (3) Such programs tend to reduce local food production, leading to more starving. The law of unintended consequences doesn't care how good your intentions are. .
  - EliRivers 14y ago
    (2) If you do not feed starving people you then have dead people. This is the end state we wish to avoid. Setting up a system so that you do not need to keep feeding them yourself is a good idea. It does not negate the need to feed them now to avoid them being dead.
    - anamax 14y ago
      > If you do not feed starving people you then have dead people. There are going to be dead people no matter what you do. However, we can affect how many dead people there are. My goal is to minimize the number of dead&starving people. Your strategy produces more dead&starving people than my strategy. What's your goal? I know that you think that "now" is different, but it isn't. Applying your strategy in the past produced starving people. Why should we keep doing that? ("this time" isn't different.) I forgot another point, such programs always result in corruption which steals food money from poor people and gives it to rich ones. Why do you support that? (You don't get to point to the good that would supposedly happen if such corruption didn't happen. It does, so if you support the programs, you're willing to accept the corruption and its consequences.) I don't think that your desire to feel good about yourself justifies policies that are as harmful as yours are.
      - intended 14y ago
        To quote another post earlier in this thread > And this is actually a salient point - subsidy and direct-aid programs like this are never meant as a permanent solution to anything. Nobody is dumb enough to believe this. These programs buy time to find a systemic solution - because it's better to keep these people hobbling along while we try to fix the larger systemic issues that perpetuate their poverty, than to simply let them all die while we tinker with the knobs and switches.
- genwin 14y ago
  > Because these people are starving? Is that not a good reason? Certainly not, if/when it's true that giving the free food causes more people to starve in the long run. Less misery is better than more misery, as sad as any misery is.
  - EliRivers 14y ago
    By this logic, the humane thing to do now is to create a super-virus that kills all humanity. No more human misery, ever. Thanks for that. :)
    - genwin 14y ago
      No, that would be more misery. The least amount of misery is the fewest deaths.
smcl 14y 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"?
- kamaal 14y ago
  Because I know corruption is one of the many many issues that resulted in this problem and not the only thing responsible for it. If you were to fix corruption, may be they will be fed this season, but they will hungry in next 6 months. Corruption is happening inside this free food distribution program. But why do those people even need free food? Unfortunately this question is never asked. Those people don't have productive jobs to afford it. That is why we always keep hearing of these stories. Our focus must be to provide them jobs so that they can buy it, instead of making it a free stuff.
  - studentrob 14y ago
    of course, jobs are needed. #1 is food tho- if you are starving then you are unhealthy and not able to take care of yourself . some people are born into poverty and need more of a leg up in the beginning because if they make any mistakes they die. if we make mistakes, we have many legs to stand on, because we are very very privileged. have you ever given to charity or given anything away for free? or have you ever been given something for free?
  - lilsunnybee 14y ago
    If income is distributed too unequally, it is extremely common that there just aren't enough jobs to go around at any given time. A wealthy person only needs so many servants. Everyone else has needs too, but if they don't have money to throw around they can't stimulate the economy. The immediate problem here is corruption and a non-functioning law enforcement and court system. The pervasive root problem is actually that a fair amount of Indians don't have the disposable income to create enough jobs for everyone, or to provide for the sick, elderly, or disabled in their communities. And letting people die or suffer from malnutrition, whether they're productive or not, is just sick.
- 14y ago
pessimist 14y 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 14y 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.
- kamaal 14y ago
  I agree with you on this. But the point is this hunger stories reappear after the aid exhausts out. Which means people are not put to work to afford it.
- maheshs 14y ago
  There are always two way to solve the problem. In this case politician can solve this problem by implementation and execution of plan for increasing the productivity and increasing the jobs. Second plan is to feed them with free food. Second one is easy and give them quick votes, though its dangerous for poor people as well as country.
  - intended 14y ago
    Again, the food isn't free. It's drastically subsidized. The PDS system creates a floor price for agricultural produce, ensuring against the vagaries of the market. At th same time it distorts market prices. Given the inefficiency in the system, and it's lack of gearage which can transmit efficiency benefits to the bottom of the pyramid, the PDS system is an interim measure to help pull the bottom out of poverty.
pessimist 14y 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!
- kamaal 14y ago
  Hmmm, I actually come from a pretty poor financial background. What helped me rise is self esteem to never accept help and learn to be strong instead. In fact right from the beginning I've refused scholarships. I purposefully turned down the option of reservation for my engineering course though I was perfectly eligible for it. My dad always says if you let people be strong they will be strong. Let them be weak and they will be weak. What these people need is not free stuff and reservations. They just need to be shown how to be strong and work their way out of the problem.
  - vacri 14y ago
    Who will be showing them?
  - hashpipe 14y ago
    It's strange that you refused a scholarship - who knows where that money went (another needy student or another scam). Plus, turning down a reservation only means that you made sure that someone less deserving (via reservation) got an engineering seat over a more deserving one (a general student who otherwise would have ranked just enough to get admitted). While your intent is good, I think you are letting your ego do the talking - dishing out theories over practicals. Practicality beats the st out of theory any given day. Try telling the farmer who hasn't eaten for a week to stand up and be strong - I bet he can't stand (quite literally).
    - ams6110 14y ago
      Any time someone gives you something you then have to dance to their tune. Do it on your own and you call the shots.
intended 14y 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/ http://rs100aday.com/about/)
- kamaal 14y ago
  I agree with you in principle. But the point in discussion is why do people need to be provided food for free? Clearly if they are not able to buy for a real long time- This indicates they are not earning enough. So fixing that makes more sense than fixing problems in the free food program. Because if we fix the affordability issue we will not need the free food program at the first place. Yes the distribution system is broken. I think a step to fix that was tried- FDI in retail was good. Companies could buy directly from the farmers, eliminating middle men and the entire inefficient distribution cycle. But I and you know well the political opposition to those reforms.
if_else 14y 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_jester 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
- genwin 14y ago
  I think there's plenty of evidence that free food does more harm than good in the long run, outside of emergency situations that couldn't reasonably be planned for. In the long run millions of beggars wouldn't have been born in the first place if free food hadn't been available. (That's not to say that beggars are always caused by free food.) Humans aren't much different than ducks in this regard.
  - anu_gupta 14y ago
    > In the long run millions of beggars wouldn't have been born in the first place if free food hadn't been available. You're right, of course, because their parents would have starved to death. A civilised society does not allow its citizens to die of starvation. In the long run of course it would be preferable to not have to give out free food, but until there's a viable alternative, that's what a civilised country does.
Retric 14y 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 14y ago
"LIVIN' THE GOOD LIFE, CHUMPS, sittin' here on this dirt floor at subsistence level. GOT IT MADE."
brown9-2 14y ago
Because it takes years if not decades to improve agriculture and the economy, and people are starving today.
bicknergseng 14y 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.
- crusso 14y ago
  notion that providing essential services and goods like education, healthcare, and food I can see the benefit of free education. When you educate people, it has a multiplicative effect on the mobility of the individuals. Education has the ability to unlock a great deal of potential in each person which has a seemingly obvious benefit for the rest of the society. I would argue that giving completely free food and healthcare do weaken most societies. The problem is that there's an all-too-large portion of most societies that will avoid working if they can get basic necessities like food, healthcare, and housing met for free. Working is good for people. It gets them out of bed, gets them thinking, gives some people their only exercise, forces people to deal with others socially, and quite literally keeps some folks out of trouble that they'd otherwise get into if they were completely idle. I'm all for a safety net to keep people suffering from catastrophic health problems or temporary situations from dying/starving... but the notion that we should make "free food" a policy is just broken.
mikeash 14y 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.
- anamax 14y ago
  When's the last time a free market had a famine? How often do "not free" markets have famines? In the US, poor people are fat. They don't lack food. (They don't lack TVs, cars, or houses either.)
  - yarrel 14y ago
    How are the crops doing in the US this summer, btw?
    - anamax 14y ago
      > How are the crops doing in the US this summer, btw? Not particularly well. We'll have to reduce our exports and draw down some of our reserves. In other words, our poor people can continue to be fat, not starving. They might buy fewer TVs for a while or reduce the amount of processed calories to handle the extra cost. We can have several years of bad crops before we'll have a food shortage. Of course, it would help if we stopped using food for automobile fuel. (The brazilians would love to sell us methanol for less but they don't have an early presidential primary.)
  - mikeash 14y ago
    Famine isn't the issue. A famine is when there simply isn't enough food within a population. The issue at hand is when there's enough food that isn't well distributed, which is a completely different phenomenon.
    - 14y ago
rayiner 14y ago
> If we help boost agriculture productivity and work on our economy most people will be able to buy food. [Citation needed]
nayanga 14y 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 14y 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'.