Representative image. Credit: Reuters
India’s hunger situation is a serious cause for concern that needs the attention of policymakers at the highest level.
According to a 2015 World Bank report, malnutrition in India is two to seven times higher than other BRICS member countries. The same result was indicated in the 2021 report
of Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations.
Further adding that with the current rate of decline, India will not be
able t0 achieve the target of ‘zero hunger by 2030’ given by the United Nations (see table 1).
Country |
Prevalence of undernourishment in the total population
|
Prevalence of wasting in children (<5 year of age)
|
Prevalence of Stunting in children (<5 year of age)
|
Prevalence of overweight in children (<5 year of age)
|
|
2004-06 |
2018-20 |
2020 |
2012 |
2020 |
2012 |
2020 |
India |
21.6 |
15.3 |
17.3 |
41.7 |
30.9 |
2.4 |
1.9 |
Source: FAO 2021
This was the story of pre-COVID-19 era. The onset of the pandemic has
made the situation even more challenging. The executive director of the
UN Food Programme, David Beasley in 2020 warned global leaders against the looming crisis of hunger. The 2021 Global Hunger Index (GHI) report
is a reflection of the same warning. The GHI report came at a time when
the world is recovering from the devastation of COVID-19. India slid
down to rank 101 out of 116 countries. India fared only better than
Afghanistan and the least developed countries of Africa. It fared worse
than Bangladesh (76) and Pakistan (92).
Hunger can be defined in many ways. According to the FAO,
“While many people may not be “hungry” in the sense that they are
suffering physical discomfort caused by a severe lack of dietary energy,
they may still be food insecure. They might have access to food to meet
their energy requirements, yet are uncertain that it will last, or they
may be forced to reduce the quality and/or quantity of the food they
eat in order to get by. This moderate level of food insecurity can
contribute to various forms of malnutrition and can have serious
consequences for health and well-being.”
Hunger is caused by low-level dietary energy due to insufficient
consumption. A certain amount of calorie intake (dietary energy) is
required to lead a normal, active and healthy life; regular deficiency
makes it chronic. The organisation referred to “hunger” as
“undernourishment”. Hunger and undernourishment have severe impact on
children under the age of five, causing wasting and stunting among them.
These two terms are also associated with mortality among the same age
group. The GHI score is based on these indicators: undernourishment,
child wasting, child stunting and child mortality.
These challenges were manifested in Millennium Development Goals (MDG),
a set of eight goals, out of which two goals are concerned with hunger:
MDG 1 (removal of extreme poverty and hunger) and MDG 4 (reduce child
mortality). Most of the developing countries achieved the MDG1 but
failed in MDG4. To finish the unfinished work of MDG, Sustainable
Development Goals were adopted with target year of 2030. The second goal
(SDG2)
called for ‘zero hunger’ and inherited the indicators of GHI. In recent
decades the world has successfully reduced the incidence of hunger and
starvation but the pandemic has disrupted the path of progress and has
threatened to reverse the achievement towards ‘zero hunger’.
So, what is the mechanism to access food? Amartya Sen in 1986
had revealed that methods to acquire food varies from person-to person;
a peasant can produce food by investing labour in the field, wage
labourers avail it from exchange of their wages with basket of goods
including food. Wage labourers first exchange labour power for wages and
then wages for commodity collection including food. Similar patterns
emerge in other mechanisms to access food. For example, earning from
selling services, profits by running business and claiming share in the
total output of share-cropping. These exchanges act as fulcrum in
‘access to food’.
Thus, it is important for policymakers to examine the forces that
regulate this exchange. Eradication of hunger depends on the adequacy of
policy intervention to curb the menace of hunger and starvation. The
biggest challenge for policymakers is to free their country from hunger
and poverty. Watts and Bohle in 1993 had revealed that poverty and hunger are inextricably linked.
Policy intervention
One of the biggest challenges to independent India was hunger. Economic historian Tirthankar Roy
rather sarcastically stated that food grain shortage is a gift of the
colonial period to independent India. From 1891 to 1946, the average
growth of crop outlay was only 0.4% which translated into an increasing
number of poor populations along with overall population. Consequently,
per capita availability of food fell and the crisis was severe in
overpopulated Bengal and resulted in the famine of 1943.
Nehru envisioned a developed India through the development of
agriculture. This sector has the potential to eradicate hunger, raise
the income by accelerating economic growth since agriculture, industry
and services are interlinked. Almost 20% of the public sector plan
expenditure was assigned to the agriculture sector during the first and
second plan. The importance of agriculture can be witnessed through the
surge in credit flow to Rs 2,000 crore in 1975-76 from Rs 70 crore in
1950-51 (P. Balakrishnan, 2007). Nehru’s vision realised through the
‘Green Revolution’ transformed India into a food secure country.
Also read: The Little-known Nitrogen and Phosphorus Crisis of Industrial Agriculture
However, whatever progress have been achieved is still not enough as one-fourth of the country is still food insecure.
In 2001, 47 tribals and Dalits were starved to death in south-eastern
Rajasthan as the state reeled from its third consecutive year of
drought. This happened despite India’s warehouses were brimming with an
excess of around 40 million tonnes of foodgrains that year. This led to
the ‘right to food’ case,
in which the Right to Food Campaign, a civil society network of
activists and organisations, moved the Supreme Court to secure food
security for Indians.
The apex court in its ruling in People’s Union for Civil Liberties v. Union of India & Others,
taking reference from Article 21 (ensure dignity of life) in light of
Article 47 (ensure wellbeing of citizens is duty of the state) of the
Constitution of India, provided a legal framework to both the articles.
The then UPA government has enacted Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Job
Guarantee (MGNREGA) Act 2005 and National Food Security (NFS) Act 2013 , to provide direct benefits to the poor. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had disregarded MGNREGA as a ‘living monument of UPA’s failure’ and other governments had also neglected the NFS initially.
The COVID-19 pandemic, however, led the Modi government — which has
failed to provide a clear economic policy on ‘food insecurity’ — to
sanction an additional Rs 40,000 crore to MGNREGA to fight against
hunger and unemployment. Through NFS, the government has also started to
distribute lentils to maintain nutrients among the beneficiaries.
Modi government’s negligence translated into stagnation of the GHI
score of India. The score has decelerated from 38.8 in 2000 to the range
of 28.8-27.5 between 2012 and 2021.
There
is an urgent need for immediate policy intervention to uplift the poor
from hunger and deprivation. There is a great need to revamp the
existing policy, according to current requirement, as Keynes said that
in the time of crisis, the government must solve the problem by
immediate intervention rather than “wait for an invisible hand to fix
the problem” because, as he succinctly puts it, “in the long run we all
are dead”.
Utsav Kumar Singh is assistant professor of Economics at Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi.
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