Unmaking food security: the targeted public distribution system in Kerala

In my article on India dismantling its own food security system by using, to an extent paradoxically, the very same technologies devised for enhancing the system’s effectiveness, I have argued that the UID project, as elaborated by the Indian central government, poses a serious threat to the PDS, the system that should guarantee nationwide food security. It is suggested, indeed, that by substituting ration cards with a multipurpose 12-digit number, the new system will delink households from their local ration dealers, and undermine, by doing so, the viability that each ration shop has developed over the decades. The idea of substituting a “costly” food security system with a more efficient one, based on bank transfers or on food stamps to the poor, is opposed primarily by the very recipients of PDS – namely, those citizens that do not avail a bank account to receive transfers, and have relied on subsidized rations for the entire duration of the PDS. And still, in observing these dynamics, we should bear in mind the praeludium of the story, marked by the unmaking of the universal PDS through the neoliberal policy turn in June 1997.