Pick a card, any card

Gulshan, a stick-thin labourer in his 50s, throws three cards down onto the bed outside his mud house in Maheshpur. Each card is a dog-eared booklet, messily filled in to show purchases of subsidised food under the PDS. The cover has come off one of them. The cards belong to his sons. One has moved away and one has died, but Gulshan uses them to feed his extended family. Urmila, the son’s widow, says that without cheap food her own sons would go hungry. She worries about how long she will be allowed to keep her dead husband’s card and whether she will ever be able to get one of her own.

There are three sorts of card in Maheshpur: one for those below the poverty line (BPL), one for those above it but who still need help (APL) and one for the poorest of the poor (antyodaya) which has a larger subsidy. In Uttar Pradesh, BPL holders can buy 20kg of rice a month at 6.15 rupees a kilo and 15kg of wheat at 4.65 rupees a kilo. Gulshan’s are BPL cards but he is unsure how much he is entitled to. Anyway, he says, sometimes nothing is available in the PDS shops. There is a lot of confusion about the cards. In theory, everyone with a BPL card should be on a list drawn up after the 2002 survey. But some people who have cards are not on the list and some who are on the list do not have cards. So coverage is patchy. Maheshpur has 179 BPL cardholders but man who runs the PDS in the village says there should be at least 500 or 600.

In Kailashpur, Sabur Sai also has three cards, one each for his wife, daughter, and wife’s sister. Chhattisgarh has an even more complicated system than Uttar Pradesh: there are six cards, colour coded, because the state has added special ones for widows and pensioners. But the basic entitlement is common to all and unlike in Maheshpur, everyone knows what it is: 35kg of rice for 2 rupees each and 10kg of wheat for 2 rupees (and “not a single grain less”, says Sabur Sai). Subsidised grain therefore costs less than half what it does in Uttar Pradesh. Sabur Sai says that thanks to this and to the NREGA make-work scheme, he has stopped herding goats for other people and bought 40 of his own. Several of them are nosing around his courtyard, knocking over furniture. Because he can keep an eye on them while working on his smallholding, his farm has become more productive. He gestures to the other side of the valley where his brother-in-law is knee-deep in mud behind a buffalo, ploughing a field that once lay fallow.

Expanding safety nets in Chhattisgarh was not expensive, since spending on cheap food is only 4% of the budget. But by itself expansion will not have done much. Theft from anti-poverty programmes—mainly by reselling subsidised food on local markets and pocketing the difference—is endemic. An investigation by Bloomberg, a news agency, calculated that $14.5 billion worth of food has been ripped off from the PDS in Uttar Pradesh alone in the past ten years. The fraudsters operate with virtual impunity, so expanding the programmes simply risked expanding scope for corruption.

So the Chhattisgarh government changed the system. First, it encouraged people to think of the benefits as a right, not a privilege. The argument ran that if beneficiaries knew what they were entitled to, they would kick up a fuss when money went missing or services were not provided. Since there are millions of beneficiaries, they were more powerful than a few bribable civil servants.

On almost every house in Kailashpur, therefore, there is a small yellow plaque by the front door with the name of all PDS cardholders, the number and kind of card they have and the dates these were distributed. The walls of the village shop are also covered by thousands of names and numbers. The names are those of all card holders and of the people who run the PDS. The numbers are of every card, the prices of sugar, rice and pulses, and a toll-free number to ring in case of complaint. Local watchdog organisations say complaints made through the helplines usually lead to some sort of redress. According to Reetika Khera of the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, only 10% of PDS shops in Chhattisgarh reported that food had gone missing or been stolen in 2009-10 down from almost 50% in 2004-05. In Uttar Pradesh the “theft rate” remains stuck at about 60%. Gulshan shrugs his bony shoulders when asked about the problem. “We are poor, ” he says. “What can we do? ”