Madhushree Sekher

A life-cycle approach to food and nutrition security in India

Indias poor performance on critical food and nutrition security indicators despite substantial economic prosperity has been widely documented. These failings not only hamper national progress, but also contribute significantly to the global undernourished population, particularly children. While the recently passed National Food Security Act 2013 adopts a life-cycle approach to expand coverage of subsidized food grains to the most vulnerable households and address food security, there remains much to be desired in the legislation. Access to adequate food for 1.24 billion people is a multifaceted problem requiring an interconnected set of policy measures to tackle the various factors affecting food and nutrition security in India. In the present opinion paper, we discuss a fivefold strategy that incorporates a life-cycle approach, spanning reproductive health, bolstering citizen participation in existing national programmes, empowering women, advancing agriculture and better monitoring the Public Distribution System in order to fill the gaps in both access and adequacy of food and nutrition.

Food Security as a Lagging Component of India's Human Development: A Function of Interacting Entitlement Failures

Abstract Contemporary India possesses a food security paradox—progress in combating food insecurity is occurring at a slower pace than might be expected, given the nations rapid economic growth. This paper provides a conceptual framework to explain this phenomenon. Drawing on the work of Amartya Sen, it uses a broadly framed analysis to conceptualise the problem in terms of the interactivity between three types of entitlement failure. Firstly, pure exchange system entitlement (abilities to obtain food from welfare programmes) has been curtailed by institutional shortcomings in pivotal programmes. Secondly, opportunities for wage-labour entitlement (abilities to obtain food from monetary incomes) have been restricted for vulnerable households because of the sequencing and geographical patterning of recent economic growth in India. Thirdly, opportunities for vulnerable households to address their needs through own-production entitlement (abilities to grow ones own food) have been curbed by land fragmentation and environmental degradation. These interactions have created vicious cycles of food insecurity for vulnerable households. Through this approach, the deeper causal roots of Indias food security paradox are articulated, thus underscoring the importance of multi-pronged, holistically constructed policy agendas.

Local Governance in Rural India: Tracing Institutional Voids

This paper, with broad-brush strokes, portrays the contours of governance practice and challenges, focusing on the local governance process and service delivery in rural India. Looking at the structural and institutional issues from a political economy perspective, the paper is less an attempt to draw policy lessons than to understand what has happened and under what constraints. It draws on insights from research by the author in local governance and service delivery in rural India and highlights issues that are often overlooked in current debates on local governance and service delivery, such as the role of informal institutions, multi-level governance, and political realities of relationships at people’s level.

Understanding Governance as a Process

The notion that the term of governance refers to new processes but involves existing government has much currency (Finer in Comparative government. Allen Lane, London, 1970; Jayal and pai in Democratic Governance in India: Challenges of Poverty, Development and Identity. Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2001). In fact, the output of governance is not very different from government (Stoker in International Social Science Journal 50(155):17–27, 1998). In substantial scholarship available on the subject, the changing nature of government and, therefore, of the state is inevitably an object of analysis.

Governance and governed: why governance?

The idea and practice of governance have been much discussed particularly during the last two decades, and the theme now occupies a critical place not only in the development discourse but in the context of the legitimacy of a regime as well. At the very level of practice, the issue of governance is now beset with qualifications such as ‘good governance’ or ‘good enough governance’. One dimension of the governance question that has acquired significance in India as elsewhere in recent past is the changing position of the state vis-a-vis the market, the society in question and the larger transnational forces.

Community-Based Environmental Governance and Local Justice

With the millennial goals aiming to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015 (MillenniumEcosystemAssessment 2003), there is now an added urgency to conserve resources and bring a convergence between conservation objectives with poverty reduction strategies so that the latter goal is met without ‘subsidies’ from nature that could prove to be environmentally catastrophic (Anderson et al. 1991). Thus, protecting and conserving the environment is accepted as not only key to achieving the ‘environmental sustainability goal’ but also ‘socio-economic wellbeing’ of the poor (Deverajan et al. 2002). Clearly, in recent years there has been a convergence in the call for a ‘greener earth’ and the call for ‘inclusive’ development processes focusing on human wellbeing, which prescribe a redistribution of income and a reduction in the degree of vulnerability by lessening environmental degradation. This paradigm shift demonstrates the relationship between environmental degradation and issues of social justice, rural poverty and human rights (Gadgil and Guha 1993, Guha 1989, Kothari and Parajuli 1993, Peluso 1993, Shiva 1993). There are a number of studies today that underscore the conservation and poverty-inequity link, and emphasise that ‘nature’ cannot be treated separately from other development concerns because environment quality matters to the poor (Brosius et al. 1998, Duraiappah 2004, WRI 2005).