National Food Security Bill Challenges and Options

Despite ensuring ample availability of food, existence of food insecurity at the micro-level in the country has remained a formidable challenge for India. The recently introduced National Food Security Bill (NFSB) aims to address this and marks a paradigm shift in addressing the problem of food security—from the current welfare approach to a rights based approach. This paper, based on a thorough analysis of the various plausible implications of the NFSB, suggests that India learns from the global best practices, and adapts them to Indian conditions to put an Indian signature to this scheme with a view to tackle its food and nutritional security concerns. This can be done by allowing enough flexibility in the NFSB to innovate and evolve into such a CCT scheme, using the globally acclaimed expertise of India in IT and Aadhaar, to connect to and pull those at the bottom of economic pyramid.