Food security

Story hook

It is 28 March 2020. India is four days into the world's largest COVID-19 lockdown. The Finance Minister announces PM Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY) — an additional 5 kg of free foodgrain per person per month on top of the existing NFSA quota, for 80 crore beneficiaries. The initial three-month outlay was Rs.40,000 crore; over the next 33 months it would balloon to Rs.3.91 lakh crore, the single largest food-welfare programme in human history. By 31 December 2022, PMGKAY had distributed ~1,118 lakh metric tonnes of foodgrains drawn down from FCI godowns.

In January 2023, the Cabinet folds PMGKAY into NFSA — the existing 5 kg/month became free (instead of Rs.2/3/1 per kg), and the additional 5 kg was discontinued. The cumulative annual food subsidy bill stays north of Rs.2 lakh crore.

A few kilometres away in any village anganwadi, a different food-security programme runs quietly — ICDS (Integrated Child Development Services, 1975) — providing supplementary nutrition, immunisation, health check-ups, and pre-school education to 8 crore children under 6 and 2 crore pregnant + lactating mothers through ~14 lakh anganwadi centres. After 2021's rebrand to Mission Saksham Anganwadi and Poshan 2.0, the scheme integrates Anaemia Mukt Bharat, the National Crèche Scheme, and Poshan Abhiyan.

For UPSC, food security is the single most cross-cutting topic in agriculture and welfare.

Why this matters for UPSC

Food security spans GS-II (welfare schemes, vulnerable sections), GS-III (agriculture, food management, buffer stocks), and the constitutional right-to-food jurisprudence. Prelims has tested PDS-NFSA-ICDS-PMGKAY parameters in 2018, 2020, 2022 cycles; Mains has set 15-mark essays in 2017, 2019, 2022 on the food-security architecture and its critique.