She and her husband struggled to make even 1 rupee a day from their tailoring business after India went into a Covid-19 lockdown in March. They often have nothing to eat.
Still, like millions of other Indians, Nafisa has never gotten any of the subsidised food promised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's administration. Her 5-year-old son, Salman, doesn't even bother asking for food anymore, because he knows there's no point. Raja Bhaiya, the secretary of aid group Vidya Dham Samiti which works in the Banda district, said some shopkeepers also direct grain that's meant for the programme for their own sales, at higher prices.
That means local agencies like the one Nafisa visited receive more applications than they have quotas for, according to two officials with the programme in Uttar Pradesh who asked not to be named because the information isn't public. The food department is regularly advising states to cover any left-out eligible persons, within the coverage limits, he said. During the pandemic, the programme has been scaled up, with Uttar Pradesh alone adding about 4 million people.
On top of that, about 80 million migrant workers, some of whom don't have access to the food programme, were also offered grains for free in May and June. Some economists in the country are calling for a universal public distribution system, removing the need for a ration card to access the subsidised-grain stores and opening them up since the state is sitting on huge crop stockpiles.
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