The National Food Security Act, 2013 converted food subsidy from a welfare programme into a legal entitlement. It covers up to 75% of the rural population and 50% of the urban population — about two-thirds of India — which on Census 2011 figures works out to a ceiling of 81.35 crore persons. Within that, the Act keeps two tiers. Priority Households receive 5 kg of foodgrains per person per month. Antyodaya Anna Yojana households — the poorest of the poor, a category created in December 2000, well before the Act — receive 35 kg per household per month, irrespective of how many people live in it. That flat household quota was designed as a protection, but it produces a result the draft Bill calls inequitable: because it does not scale with size, a single-person AAY household draws 35 kg per head while a seven-member AAY household draws 5 kg per head, no more than an ordinary Priority Household despite being classified as poorer. Since January 2024 these entitlements have been supplied free of cost under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, extended by the Cabinet for five years from 1 January 2024 at an estimated cost of about Rs 11.80 lakh crore.

The draft raises a question that runs through all targeted welfare: whether equity should be measured per person or per household. On a per-person test the present AAY quota is indefensible — the poorest category delivers wildly different amounts per head depending on family size, and for the largest families delivers no more than the ordinary Priority quota. On a household test it looks different, because a single elderly widow living alone is not half as needy as a couple, and the fixed costs of a household do not shrink in proportion to its size. The draft resolves the tension in one direction only. Because the 35 kg ceiling is retained, no household gains: five-member and larger households stay where they are, and every smaller household receives less. Given that AAY was designed for destitute households — the aged, widows, terminally ill persons and persons with disabilities with no assured means of subsistence — small households are disproportionately represented in exactly the category the change would reduce. A second issue sits alongside it. The 81.35 crore ceiling is still computed on Census 2011, and the next Census has a reference date of 1 March 2027, so the coverage base will not be revised for some years yet. Third, the debate is entirely about quantity of cereal at a time when the nutrition data have diverged: stunting has fallen sharply while wasting has barely moved, and adult metabolic disease is rising on a diet in which carbohydrates already supply 62.3% of daily energy against 12% from protein. A cereal-centric PDS addresses calorie sufficiency well and dietary diversity hardly at all.