The National Advisory Council, headed by UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, will review the draft Food Security Bill on Thursday.
As part of the exercise, the NAC will look into the “deficiencies” of the draft, earlier approved by an EGoM headed by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, and suggest ways to address them.
“The NAC will decide what shape the draft food security bill should take,” said a government source.
Sources said the main issue before the NAC would be to have an accurate count of beneficiaries, including below poverty line (BPL) persons and other vulnerable sections of society like women and urban poor. Sources said the idea is to go beyond “food security” and consider providing “nutritional security” to the poor. “That is a complex issue. The NAC will have to ensure that no man, woman or child is left out of the government’s proposed food security net,” said sources.
“The state will have to ensure that no man, woman or child is left out,” they said.
The second point the NAC will ponder over is fixing the food grain allocation in order to make the right to food law meaningful.
Though the draft bill mentions 25 kg per family per month at Rs 3/kg, activists like development economist Jean Dreze Aruna Roy and Harsh Mander (all of whom are NAC members now) want it to be increased to at least 35 kg, the quantity being provided to around 6.5 crore BPL families under the subsidised PDS.