FirstPost took it to Amartya Sen on the Food Security Bill. The beauty of being a socialist is that you never have to personally worry about paying the bill. And as it turns out, the bill is going to create a bottomless pit.
The expenditure behind the food security bill is stated to be at Rs 1,20,000 crore. But this the CACP report feels is just the tip of the iceberg. This expenditure does not take into account “additional expenditure (that) is needed for the envisaged administrative set up, scaling up of operations, enhancement of production, investments for storage, movement, processing and market infrastructure etc.”
Apart from thoroughly skewing incentives for farmers towards rice and wheat production, the bill also doesn’t address what happens when there is a drought, or how food procurement can be scaled.
What fascinates me is that our government seems willing to spend huge amounts of tax-payer money on things that a) are not backed by any kind of hard data, and b) not through through fully. However, if you believe that our government is inherently evil, then the Food Security Bill has found its mark: an estimated Rs 2,07,000 crore will be siphoned off by middlemen.
Forget scams, if you were still looking for a persuasive reason to fire our government, this should be it.
Read the whole thing here: 10 reasons why Amartya Sen is wrong about food security bill
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