National food security act, 2013: Retrospect and prospect

Professor Amartya sen is of the view that "India should highly prioritize the elimination of latent hunger, undernourishment and malnutrition. Democracies take quick notice of famine but not of invisible famines which affect many more millions than famines". Although Government of India has made a lot of efforts in this direction since independence, still issuse of hungar and malnutrition are biggest concerns for our policymakers. The National Food Security Act, 2013 is latest move of their strategy. This research paper analyses the relevancy of the Act to ensure food and nutritional security in India and gives some meaningful suggestions for its successful implementation.

It has been rightly said by famous economist Jean Dreze that," chronic hunger has become on accepted part of life in India". India has the largest number of hungry people in the world. There are 900 million chronically hunger people in the world, one third of them live in India. Almost fifty percent of Indian children are underweight, thirty percent of newborn have low weight at birth, and over fifty five percent of married women and about eighty percent of young babies in the age group 6–35 months are anemic. During 2006–07 malnutrition contributed to seven million Indian children dying, nearly two million before the age of one.1 In rural India most of people are vulnerable to malnutrition due to poor access to nutritional food. It is a large impediment in economic development of our country, because such malnourished population is unhealthy on both grounds mentally as well as physically. Such workforce is unable to utilize its productivity optimally, Thus very first requirement for economic development of our country is to tackle the issues of hunger and poverty. So Government of India has initiated National Food Security Act, 2013 to evolve out of this problem.