President gives assent to order, Opp criticises govt move
STATESMAN NEWS SERVICE
New Delhi, 5 July
Two days after the Union Cabinet cleared the National Food Security Ordinance, the President of India, Mr Pranab Mukherjee today gave his assent to it, even as the ruling Congress went all out to showcase this “historic” welfare measure as the “world’s biggest public food security law” that is set to become the party’s showpiece, “game-changer” issue in the coming general elections. 
Barely three weeks before the normal resumption of the monsoon session of Parliament, the Congress-led UPA government went ahead to take the ordinance route, in the teeth of fierce protests from the Opposition, to give effect to the legislation.  The legislation seeks to provide legal entitlement to 67 per cent of the country’s 1.2 billion population ~ 75 per cent in rural and 50 per cent in urban India ~ to get 5 kg of foodgrains, rice, wheat and coarse grains, per person every month at highly subsidised rates of Rs 3, 2, 1 respectively through ration shops. 
About 2.43 crore poorest of the poor families covered under the Antyodaya Anna Yojana scheme under the PDS would also get legal entitlement to 35 kg of foodgrains per family per month. 
The Opposition, including the BJP and the SP, have cried foul, questioning the government’s “tearing hurry” in adopting the ordinance route just ahead of a Parliament session, and describing it as a “political gimmick with a clear eye on the coming Lok Sabha elections”.  
Rejecting such allegations, the Congress general secretary Mr Ajay Maken, accompanied by the food minister Mr K V Thomas, told media persons at their party’s headquarters here that the Opposition’s “persistent disruption of Parliament” and its “stonewalling of the Food Security Bill in the last session” had left the government with “no option” but to press ahead with such a crucial social welfare intervention in “larger public interest”. 
Mr Maken dismissed the charge that the Congress was eyeing early Lok Sabha elections after clearing the “populist” food security legislation. He claimed it was not linked to elections, asserting that it was part of the Congress manifesto for the 2009 Lok Sabha elections and a “dream of the Congress president Mrs Sonia Gandhi, the vice-president Mr Rahul Gandhi and the Prime Minister Mr Manmohan Singh” which, he added, has “now come true”.   
Both Mr Maken and Mr Thomas gave a chronology of the food legislation’s progress through executive and legislative domains over the past four years, maintaining that the states, which are required to identify the beneficiaries and implement this law, had all along kept in the loop. A six-month period has been provided for implementation of the legislation in states. 
“This legislation is aimed at ensuring food security for 81 crore poor and aam aadmi (common person) across the country, it will help fight hunger and malnutrition, benefit women and children…With this we are fulfilling our key manifesto pledge, so obviously when we go to the people (in coming polls) they will be able to judge our credibility and performance,” said Mr Maken. The Congress tried to refute the Opposition’s charge that it had bypassed Parliament and had shown “contempt” to it. 
The ordinance will be placed before Parliament when it meets soon for its monsoon session, and will get replaced by a regular law. From the reassembly of Parliament, an ordinance ceases to operate at the “expiration of six weeks.’’