Food as a Legal Right?

421 million people are in poverty in India’s eight poorest states.

India’s government dreadfully fails for most. The poor should receive subsidized government food and cooking fuel. Children should be enrolled in school. Yet too many don’t, and fall through the cracks.

In the 1960s, India overcame foot shortages with the “Green Revolution,” which introduced high-yield grains and fertilizers and expanded irrigation. Today, the food system is rife with corruption and inefficiency. According to The New York Times, studies show that 70 percent of a roughly $12 billion budget is “wasted, stolen or absorbed by bureaucratic and transportation costs.”

In Jhabua, for example, investigators discovered 3,500 fake food ration booklets in the district, believed to have been distributed by low-level officials to themselves and friends. Also in Jhabua, a flood of child deaths were linked to malnutrition.

With roughly 42 percent of all Indian children under age five being underweight, something has to be done to feed India’s people.

Should India simply hand out food coupons, or cash?

The Congress Party’s president, Sonia Gandhi, is fighting to create a constitutional right to food to ensure that every Indian family would quality for a monthly 77-pound bag of grain, sugar and kerosene. Such proposals have helped the Congress Party win over rural communities.

Indians have the rights to free speech, expression, and the freedom to practice any religion they choose. These rights don’t matter to the 421 million people with no food in their stomachs.

It is India’s obligation to care for its people, and if radically overhauling its food system is the best method—in either the short or long term—to do so, then the proposals should go into effect. It goes without saying that the food system needs a drastic refurbishment, whatever the changes turn out to be.

Thus, perhaps the right to eat should be added, even if only for a short time until a more efficient food system is established, to the Constitution of India. It’s for sure the one that counts the most to the poor and hungry.