The circumstances are radically different. The West Bengal Chief Minister’s indication at a press conference last Thursday that the Food Secretary would be moved out recalls the removal of the Foreign Secretary by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at a media interaction in 1986.
“You will soon have a new Foreign Secretary,” was Mr Gandhi’s “news break” ~ the term wasn’t in vogue then ~ in the presence of the incumbent, Mr AP Venkateswaran.
As it turned out in Bengal in a late evening development, the Food Secretary, Manoj Kumar Agarwal, was put on “compulsory wait” as the Public Distribution System was not functioning in the manner it was directed to at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic.
The system creaks even in normal circumstances. The replacement, we have been assured, will “oversee the matter”. The hunger persists and most particularly in rural Bengal. Basirhat and Murshidabad, for instance, are restive yet again. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has also taken umbrage at the performance of the food minister, Jyotipriya Mullick.
Though she has fixed the goalposts, the essay has somehow gone haywire. At the core of the crisis is the fact that ration cardholders are receiving less food than they are supposed to, going by the Chief Minister’s recent assurances. The other commitment was to “distribute food free of cost” till September.
The matrix prescribed had envisaged that the monthly quota would be provided in a single instalment to avoid the weekly crowd at the ration shop and thus ensure social distancing. Actually, however, barely ten per cent of the shops have distributed barely half the total allotment.
“The targeted beneficiaries could not be given even half of their monthly allotment despite repeated requests,” was the Chief Minister’s high-minded lament at Thursday’s cabinet meeting. It has taken the government a while to realise that the food policy, revised in the wake of the pandemic, needs reworking. Nabanna has arguably suffered a loss of face.
The people have been deprived of the allotment that they were promised as an extraordinary measure, and this is bound to exacerbate the raging crisis that has most severely affected those who have lost their livelihood. Visuals reaffirm that the risk of hunger aggravating the virus is dangerously real, not to forget starvation as once in parts of Odisha. If indeed space for storage has turned out to be a constraint, this wasn’t quite foreseen when the announcement was made.
In the net, supplies have dwindled in parallel to the glut. This is the bitter paradox that the food department must address with urgent despatch. Miss Banerjee has asked the police and the local clubs to step in and provide space to store the grain. If that is the solution, then so be it. But urgency is called for and the new Food Secretary will have to be on his feet.