A national daily reported recently that fruits, pulses, vegetables and grains worth Rs.58,000 crores are wasted each year in India. India's minister of state for food processing industries, Subodh Kant Sahay recently admitted as much in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Indian Parliament.
This, in a country where 220 million people live below the poverty line, where there are areas where people suffer from chronic starvation. Sahay said in the Rajya Sabha the wastage was caused by, among other factors, the lack of proper storage facilities and transportation.
The newspaper report quotes PV Suvrathan, secretary, food processing industries as saying , "The main issue is the lack of an adequate supply chain."According to the report, it costs Rs. 8 to provide the basic minimum nutrition of 2,100 caolries a day that an adult needs. So, Rs.58,000 crores is sufficient to feed all the 220 million people in the country living below the poverty line for 350 days a year.
This was disclosed by Ajay Parida, director of the bio-technology programme at the Sr. MS Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai.Mr. Parida goes on to say, "Food security is a major issue... there is starvation. There is struggle for basic food requirements."
Of course, the authorities are wary of using the term "starvation". Makes you look bad, you see, in the eyes of the world you are trying to hardsell your country as the new economic giant. There is the (in)famous instance of a young Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer in charge of a district in Orissa, insisting there was no starvation in that region. When a journalist quizzed him about the high number of deaths, he replied, with a straight face, "Oh, those deaths are not because of starvation, they are on account of progressive malnutrition."
On such finer differences of definition, are Indian government's policies framed. Starvation would have blotted the otherwise-impeccable service record of the young officer. Cases of mere progressive malnutrition, on the other hand, wouldn't attract anything more punitive than a mild slap on the wrist.
Over the years much of the debate in India has centered on the question of whether there have in fact been large number of starvation deaths. Those who say no, and thus defend the government, take a narrow view of the meaning of "starvation". They take it to mean deaths directly attributable to an extreme lack of food, and they focus on adult deaths. In fact, most deaths associated with starvation are due to a combination of a condition of prolonged malnutrition an disease.
The immediate, final cause of death, the phrase written on the death certificate, is usually some disease, rather than starvation or hunger as such. UNICEF estimates that in the year 2000, about 24,20,000 children in India died before their fifth birthdays. This was the highest number of deaths in this age group in any country.
These figures indicate, more than a fifth of the child mortality worldwide occurs in India alone. The international agencies estimate that about half of these deaths of children under five are associated with, if not directly due to, malnutrition. Thus it is feared that over a million children below the age of five die every year in India owing to malnutrition-related problems. To that number must be added a large but unknown number of adults who succumb for the same reason.
In their data keeping, international agencies such as the United Nations Children's Fund and the World Health Organization do not even keep records of starvation deaths. No one does. Even in the worst of times, few people die immediately and directly of starvation.They die more slowly, from prolonged malnutrition in combination with some disease, and the latter often makes it to the death certificate as the official "cause of death". Thus, if one takes a narrow view of the meaning of "starvation", there are few starvation deaths in India.
But hiding behind this semantic fig leaf to wish away deaths caused by prolonged and acute malnutrition borders on the criminal. A crime that Indian politicians and bureaucrats continue to commit with impunity.
A few years ago, I was headed for Kalahandi (in the state of Orissa, in eastern India), then in the news for reports of large scale starvation in the region. In Bhubaneswar, I met a couple of journalists who had flown in from Delhi to do a story on how rats were eating up the foodgrains stocked in the Food Corporation of India (FCI) warehouses. Ironically the FCI warehouses were not too far from Kalahandi, where people were dying of starvation.
You see, Mr. Suvrathan, the problem with the lack of an adequate supply chain has been around for a long time. On April 6, 2001, the Pople's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) raised the issue of people dying of starvation at a time when government warehouses were filled to the brim with surplus stock. The PUCL petition sought a ruling on whether the Right to Life means that people who are starving and too poor to buy foodgrain, can get foodgrain free of cost from the surplus stock lying with the State.
I have often wondered exactly what level of management skills are required to ensure surplus food grains make their way to hungry mouths. (The rats have worked it out, for God's sake, why can't we?) It is evident though, this new economic powerhouse of a nation of ours with a galloping sensex and nine percent growth rate, has not been able to make this happen. I believe it hasn't happened because of one simple, uncomplicated reason.
That some people in positions of influence whose job it is to ensure the smooth running of this critical supply chain, don't give a damn. They don't give a damn about either the starving people or the wasted food grains. They don't give a damn because their own private supply chains are working just fine.
Also, in India there is little or no accountability. Successive finance ministers have failed to suggest ways to curtail slothful public expenditure, to rein in the bureaucracy. So those other rats, the fat rats disguised as corrupt officials and greedy bureaucrats, and masquerading as policy makers, don't give a damn because they can get away with it.
And then there's us. In our ivory towers of double-digit growth, the supply chains are working rather smoothly. Which is why, you and me needn't starve ever.
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