The great Indian divide: Opulence and starvation

The UN's report on undernourishment in India should serve as a wake-up call. It is imperative that the government shifts its focus from superficial metrics of progress to addressing the core issue of hunger. By investing in agriculture, ensuring fair prices for farmers, and implementing effective welfare programs, India can strive towards a future where every citizen has access to nutritious food

The obscenity of a never-ending marriage is keeping the nation occupied. Almost six-months after a series of events leading to a vulgar display of wealth and opulence, the scene is now shifting for a three-month post-wedding celebration to London.

In the midst of all these celebrations, an equally outrageous study that says 55.6 per cent Indians can’t afford a healthy diet has got lost somewhere. Given that India’s population exceeds 1.44 billion, the report points out that at least 790 million people are unable to afford a healthy diet. For any country, this United Nation’s report should have been a topic for endless discussions in the media. But the cost of prevailing inequality is therefore before us. On the one hand we have the continuing marriage spectacle, with estimates of Rs 5,000-crores already spent, and on the other we have millions of people sleeping hungry every night that no one wants to talk about.

Still worse, the media has been conspicuously quiet

The Niti Aayog should have by now planned a series of meeting with the Chief Ministers, and worked out a strategy to combat hunger in a given timeline. As far as the media is concerned, if major newspapers could devote at least two full pages of news reports and analysis for a number of days after the death of Jessica Lal, and organise a media campaign with candle lights at the India Gate, I see no reason why the media should give the hunger and undernourishment statistics a quite burial.

I agree that Jessica Lal’s murder was heartbreaking and unfortunate, but if 55 per cent of the country’s population is unable to have three meals a day, it is no less shocking, distressing and immensely perturbing. For a country that is on a high growth trajectory, the appalling hunger and undernourishment statistics are nothing short of a national disgrace.

Released on July 24, the latest report of the UN State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) says India has the highest percentage of undernourished people in the world. The number of undernourished in India stands at 194.6 million. This is almost equal to the combined population of UK, France and Germany.

While I agree that 63 per cent of low, middle-income countries cannot finance their food security, as the report says, but India certainly is not constrained by inadequate finance. Even with private companies not showing any interest in putting money where it counts – eliminating hunger, it shouldn’t be difficult for India to spare adequate resources from its annual budget, which exceeds Rs 48-lakh crores in 2024.

Moreover, if the banks can write-off Rs 15.5-lakh crores of corporate toxic loans and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) can direct banks to enter into a compromise with 16,600 wilful defaulters for practically writing-off another Rs 3.5-lakh crore, it is quite evident that there is enough money to fight hunger and undernourishment.

What is lacking is a strong political will.

Coming at the time of Amrit Kaal, the fight to achieve ‘Zero Hunger’ cannot be treated casually and has to be taken up in a mission mode. Making hunger history should become the top priority. It should also be based on an honest measurement of poverty, which means it should have an index that is close to reality.

In a very thought-provoking interview: ‘Hunger, undernourishment stalking India; Placed worse than Least Developed Nations (The Wire, Jan 19, 2024) one of the country’s best known economist, Prof Prabhat Patnaik from JNU, finds the Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI) prepared by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) to be based on ‘intellectual confusion’. “If we take access to 2,200 calories per person per day in rural India and 2,100 calories per person per day in urban India, as the benchmarks for defining poverty as the Planning Commission had done since 1973, then the proportion of the poor rose from 58 per cent in 1993-94 to 68 per cent in 2011-12 to over 80 per cent in 2017-18 in rural India. On the same dates, the proportions were 57 per cent, 65 percent, and an estimated 60 percent in urban India,” he says.

Mind you, this interview was done in January, much before the UN released the State of Food Security and Nutrition of the World report in July.

To run down poverty estimates, and to claim that hunger has almost disappeared from India, a number of counter claims will obviously be made. But as I have often said that instead of getting into a tu-tu main-main over the methodology being used to measure hunger and poverty, the best way is to stand on a bridge at any railway station and look at the people disembarking from a long-distance train. The extent of poverty or what I call as the ‘algebra of poverty’ becomes starkly visible.

In addition to subsided food ration being supplied to over 80-crore labhartis under the National Food Security Act 2013; the government has launched the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojna in April 2020. It was extended in Jan 2023 for another five years. Under this programme, in addition to the food rations, 5 kg of wheat and one kg of dal is provided free of cost every month.

This clearly shows that while food availability is not a concern, what is more important is to work out a mechanism where agriculture and nutritional security is linked in a manner that ensures and assures a living income for farmers. Unless the farming household itself is food secure, it is futile to expect hunger and undernourishment to become history. Take for instance the latest report of the Situational Assessment for Agricultural Households 2019, which tells that farm incomes are the bottom of pyramid, even less than that of MNREGA workers. With an average monthly income of Rs 10,218 for a farm family comprising five members, it doesn’t shock me anymore to know that 55.6 percent of the country’s population sleeps hungry every night.

The fight to remove hunger therefore begins essentially at the farm level. As long as we continue to deny farmers a profitable price thereby ensuring economic viability of a farm; take it from me hunger and undernourishment will not disappear.

(The author is a noted food policy analyst and an expert on issues related to the agriculture sector. He writes on food, agriculture and hunger)