ABSTRACT
Food insecurity refers to both the inability to secure an adequate diet at present and the risk of being unable to do so in future. Social protection is a menu of policy instruments that addresses poverty and vulnerability through social assistance, social insurance and efforts at social inclusion. Tribal people encounter socio-economic, cultural and political problems. They are considered as a weaker section of the society. Social protection has raised up their development policy agenda. Level of living has enhanced through the implementation of various social protection programs. In contemporary democratic and political arrangements of India, policies obviously being made by politically demanded and publicly noticed rather than people oriented and appropriate to necessities. This study tries to investigate the effectiveness of Social Protection Programs in the tribal dominated backward districts of West Bengal viz Purulia, Bankura and West Midnapur. Analysis gives powerful synergies between social protection and food security. Effective social assistance programmes can alleviate chronic food insecurity or hunger and safety net programmes can address food insecurity caused by seasonality or vulnerability to livelihood shocks. Though at household level impact of social protection can range from temporarily reducing the depth of poverty, to promoting sustainable graduation out of poverty depending on the nature of the intervention, in terms of design and implementation. A comprehensive social protection programme can have impact on food security level but it is also more important to build policy linkages from social protection to other sectors – agriculture, education, health, nutrition – and to institutionalize social protection within government systems that confers justifiable improvement in the social standard of the tribes.
