Congressmen like Mani Shankar Aiyar, Jairam Ramesh and Arjun Sengupta have bowled a googly in saying that the grand old party will abolish hunger if elected. Impossible, you say? Of course, it’s easy to dismiss any out-of-the-box idea as impractical. They said it for NREGA and must be, when in an honest mood, chewing their words. A country which is the second fastest-growing in the world, with billions in reserve and farmers that have proven ability to build up food reserves even with mild incentives has only stupidity or lack of courage as the reasons for letting its people sleep hungry.

Stupidity is not to be scoffed at. Conventional responses and lack of sincerity can destroy any idea. So let’s work out the land mines. The first: when we dream big we need to show the first step. We are fiscally stretched and so any more goodies can come only if the bill is paid for. If you are smart the bill may not be impossible but it is still heavy. Living off deficits is gone, as the old lady of Mint Street reminds us, and thank you Subba Rao for not playing to the gallery. So tell us where it’s coming from? Raising the VAT, the income tax rate or tariffs?

The next is the positives. Don’t link abolition of hunger only with grain. Rokkam Radhakrishna, one of the first men in the world to show how the poor responded to prices, built complete demand systems for rich and poor at the Sardar Patel Institute when I was there, and then for the Poverty Line definition when I went to the Planning Commission as a very young man. Not one to rest on his laurels, he showed that under certain conditions two rupees a kilo of rice could actually make the poor worse off — an exercise which didn’t particularly endear him to fellow

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