Leakages from Public Distribution System (PDS) and the Way Forward

The public distribution system (PDS) has been one of the main policy instruments of the Government of India (GoI) to provide food security to the people of this country, especially the vulnerable ones. The recently enacted National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013, also relies heavily on it to deliver even more grain at highly subsidized prices to 67 per cent of population. But the existing PDS system has been highly "leaky", with large amounts of grains (40 to 50 per cent) being pilfered and diverted to open market. Also, the existing PDS delivers better in better-off states rather than in those where there is concentration of poor, raising issues of equity. Further, the food subsidy bill is ballooning, with Rs 1.15 lakh crores budgeted for FY 2015 plus (unbudgeted) arrears of more than Rs 50,000 crores. The big challenge, therefore, is how to ensure that large sums of money being spent by GoI on PDS deliver food security more efficiently, with much lesser leakages and in a more cost effective manner. In an effort to highlight the inefficiency and iniquitous nature of the existing PDS, the present paper estimates the proportion of grain that was diverted/leaked from the PDS grain-chain in 2011-12. This is done by mapping the difference between the grains off-taken by states from the Central pool and the grain consumed by the PDS beneficiaries. It also studies how tuned is the PDS welfare delivery system to the country’s poor.