The New York Times reports that India’s Congress Party is mulling a constitutional amendment that would guarantee a right to food. Some quick background info, not in the Times piece, to suggest that it might not be much of a surprise (or, as a practical matter, a big deal) if this were to happen:
(1) The Indian Constitution is easily and frequently amended, relatively speaking.
(2) When your constitution is already the longest in the world, running literally hundreds of pages, it becomes kind of hard to argue against loading up the constitution with “too much stuff.”
(3) Constitutional rights don’t all have the same effect in India as they do here. Yes, the Supreme Court of India is pretty vigorous when it comes to judicial review, but the Indian Constitution already contains a number of positive socioeconomic rights in Part IV’s “Directive Principles of State Policy,” which have been deemed judicially unenforceable, and presumably this right too would be placed in this section.
(4) At a global level, as an empirical matter, positive socioeconomic rights are becoming increasingly common, so in that sense, India would be in line with global trends to add another one. (The right to food, in particular, has become increasingly popular; whereas no constitution in 1946 contained such a right, about 15% do now. It’s also the case that the poorer the country (as measured by GDP per capita), the more likely it is to include such a right in its constitution. Those facts courtesy of a data set prepared by my co-author Mila Versteeg of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford.)
(5) And one last fact – in a manner of speaking, the Indian Constitution already contains something akin to a right to food; Article 47 (which falls under the judicially unenforceable Part IV) provides that the government “shall regard the raising of the level of nutrition and the standard of living of its people and the improvement of public health as among its primary duties.”