India is likely to approve a program guaranteeing 800 million people food, according to the Washington Post.
India's subsidized-grain program has been the world's largest democracy for decades. In its current form, it helps sustain more than 400 million rural villagers and urban slum dwellers with low-cost grains and other staples such as sugar and kerosene, according to the Washington Post.
India is preparing to launch a program that would double its size and guarantee that two-thirds of the country's population would be granted a legal right to food.
Biraj Patnaik, the principal adviser to the Supreme Court's food commissioner, said the pending Food Security Bill represents a moment of "transformative potential" for India.
"No emerging power can make a claim to be a power if 46 percent of its children are malnourished," Patnaik told the Post.
India has recently experienced dramatic economic growth, but is still home to millions who are undernourished. Indians got a horrible glimpse into the mismanagement of their government assistance programs when 23 children died last month after eating a free school lunch that was tainted with insecticide.
More than 40 percent of the food never makes it to the people it is intended to help, according to Bharat Ramaswami, a professor in the planning unit of the Indian Statistical Institute's office in New Delhi.
"It's a system that's full of holes," he said. "It's corrupt and just more costly than a privately run operation."
According to Raghvendra Singh, the founder of a small nonprofit group called Parhit Samaj Sevi Sanstha (Hindi for "for the good of others"), which works with impoverished tribes in Madhya Pradesh.
"The problems are not going to go away," he said.
Last year, rations in this region disappeared for weeks into the hands of black marketers, resulting in widespread hunger, Singh said. Eighteen children died of malnutrition, he said.
According to the Post, local officials are attending training sessions to prepare for the national program, which the government hopes to launch this month. Under the new bill, the government would provide about 11 pounds of low-cost wheat, rice or coarse grain each month to millions of people, and a bit more to the poorest families, according to the Post.
The measure also requires that pregnant and nursing mothers receive a free daily meal and a stipend of about $100.
Over 120 million schoolchildren, who receive a free lunch in India's public schools, can now have the legal right to one prepared meal in accordance with health and safety standards, according to Sakshi Balani, an analyst with PRS Legislative Research, a nonprofit group that tracks legislative and policy issues in the Indian Parliament.
The bill does not address other factors that experts say contribute to the crisis of malnutrition.
