Anyone who has
illusions about the influence of corporate interests on public policy
in India, or about the priorities of elected representatives, would do
well to read the recent correspondence among the Biscuit Manufacturers
Association (BMA), Members of Parliament and various ministries. The
main issue in this correspondence is a proposal to replace cooked
mid-day meals in primary schools with biscuits.
The trail begins with a letter from the BMA to MPs, signed by the BMA
President, who is also an employee of Parle Products. The letter makes
an elaborate plea for biscuits as an “alternative” for cooked mid-day
meals in primary schools. There is a specific pitch for the Rs 3.75
glucose biscuit packet, which allegedly contains all the required
nutrients and costs much the same as a cooked mid-day meal under
current norms. As it happens, the biggest manufacturer of such glucose
biscuit packets is none other than Parle Products.
Among other arguments, the letter mentions that biscuits have “higher
recall”. This is an interesting hint about the BMA’s real motives. In
the business world, ‘recall’ means the proportion of people who
remember a particular brand, and recall data are used to track
advertising effectiveness. It is not difficult to imagine that an
advertisement campaign based on giving every child the same packet of
biscuits every day (at the government’s expense) would have high
‘recall’.
It is perhaps not surprising that biscuit manufacturers, like other
businesses, should use their influence to sell their products. As
Milton Friedman famously said, “The business of business is business.”
What is more disturbing is the way MPs reacted to this lobbying
operation. How many of them received the BMA letter is not known. But
what is known is that at least 29 of them wrote personally to Human
Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh and urged him to consider the
biscuits proposal. Quite likely, this is just a partial count, as the
Ministry was “flooded with such letters”, according to one senior
official.
These 29 letters, obtained by the Commissioners of the Supreme Court in
the ‘right to food’ case, are quite edifying. The signatories include
members of most major political parties (Congress, BJP, RJD, Samajwadi
Party, and so on) except for the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Left
parties. Nine of them represent constituencies in Maharashtra (which
has a thriving biscuit industry), and six belong to the Shiv Sena.
Familiar names in the list include K. Natwar Singh (Congress), Ramdas
Athawale (Republican Party), Syed Shahnawaz Hussain (BJP) and Susheela
Laxman Bangaru (BJP). What is interesting is that the letters read much
the same across authors and parties. For instance, the letters signed
by Natwar Singh and Athawale are almost identical from top to bottom.
Similarly, several MPs confidently argue for biscuits on the grounds
that “the ratio of carbohydrates, proteins, fats and glucose is quite
balanced and beneficial to human health of all age group especially for
children (sic).”
The clue to this telepathy is not far to seek: most of these statements
are lifted straight from the BMA’s promotion material. In other words,
these enterprising MPs saw nothing wrong in re-hashing the BMA letter
and forwarding it to the Minister under their own signature. All this,
of course, is done in the name of the welfare of children.
To be fair, some of these MPs may genuinely feel (despite much evidence
to the contrary) that schoolchildren would be better off with biscuits
than with cooked meals. Even then, troubling questions remain. For
instance, did they form this view on the basis of serious enquiry? Or
were they swayed by the BMA’s tutorial? If it was based on enquiry, why
did they need to cut and paste from the BMA’s letter to make their
case? And is this kind of plagiarism appropriate in any case?
The letters also reveal the central role played in this campaign by Abu
Asim Azmi, MP (Samajwadi Party) from Maharashtra. Aside from
contributing one of the 29 gems sent to the Ministry, Azmi wrote
similar letters to other ministries, seeking appointments with a host
of bureaucrats and ministers. These letters repeatedly state that the
BMA has presented “the merits of substituting biscuits with the
existing pre-cooked meal”. This sentence, aside from exposing Azmi’s
innocence of the matter (there is no such thing as an ‘existing
pre-cooked meal’), is one indication — among many — that the intention
is to replace cooked meals with biscuits, and not just add biscuits to
the menu.
It is not the first time that Azmi bravely risks his reputation. During
the last few years, he has battled a spate of allegations about his
role in recent incidents of communal violence in Mumbai, including an
affidavit filed in 1997 by the then Bombay Police Commissioner claiming
that he had links with Dawood Ibrahim. He has also been chargesheeted
by the Economic Offences Wing for siphoning off government funds in the
multi-crore cobbler scam of 1995. Whatever the truth of these
allegations (the system often confuses victim with criminal), Azmi
seems to live dangerously.
The silver lining is that the biscuit lobby received a fitting reply
from the HRD Ministry. The response was well-considered, coming as it
did after a round of consultations with state governments. Most of them
shot down the proposal for replacing cooked meals with biscuits. So did
nutrition experts such as Dr B Sesikeran, Director of the National
Institute of Nutrition, who clearly stated that the mid-day meal scheme
“is supposed to provide one wholesome meal to schoolchildren and
biscuits cannot replace it”. Following on this, Arjun Singh sent a
strong rejection letter to the BMA. Similarly, when this issue came up
in the Lok Sabha on February 26, Mohammad Ali Ashraf Fatmi, HRD
Minister of State, clarified that the biscuit approach does not
“fulfill the nutritional norms, dietary requirement and satiety of
children and further it also deprives many intrinsic benefits that are
being derived through present pattern of implementation”.
All is well that ends well in this case. It is worth mentioning,
however, that this is not an isolated attack on cooked mid-day meals
for children. Just to cite another example, Real Contracts Private
Limited recently approached the HRD Ministry with a proposal to replace
freshly cooked mid-day meals with ‘Ready to Cook and Serve Hot’ meals —
dehydrated food that would just require boiling before serving. As
Arjun Singh himself put it in a recent letter to Chief Minister
Mayawati on this issue: “We are, indeed, dismayed at the growing
requests for introduction of pre-cooked foods, emanating largely from
suppliers/marketers of packaged foods, and aimed essentially at
penetrating and deepening the market for such foods.”
According to recent media reports, the BMA has not given up. Undeterred
by the rebuttal on mid-day meals, it has now written to Renuka
Chowdhury, Minister of State for Women and Child Development, with a
similar proposal for supplying biscuits to children below the age of
six years under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). Let
us hope that Chowdhury will deliver them as straight an arrow as the
fearless Arjun Singh.
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