By J. D. Sethi
Despite what some critics have alleged, the crisis has several drivers, each one of which would be challenging enough on its own but which, taken together, seem to call for a radical restructuring that is hard to expect from a government mired in one financial scandal after another.
Therefore, prime minister Manmohan Singh’s rather hollow description that the findings of the Hunger and Malnutrition report, that about 42 per cent of India’s children under the age of five suffer from malnutrition, is a “national shame” is disgraceful in itself. The survey results indicate a catastrophic failure on the part of the world’s largest democracy to feed its poverty-stricken millions. It is also a grim reminder that Singh’s government, which has been in power at the Centre for seven continuous years, has followed policies that are anathema to the social commitments expected of it.
“Democracy and hunger cannot go together. A hungry stomach questions and censures the system’s failure to meet what is a basic biological need of every human being. There can be no place for hunger and poverty in a modern world in which science and technology have created conditions for abundance and equitable development.” And yet, all his government did was merely rename and “strengthen” the public distribution system and to “use food stocks in an imaginative and purposeful way” to stabilise prices and boost exports.
Hunger proliferated, and malnutrition grew.
When I see prime minister Manmohan Singh express shock and disgust, terming malnutrition a “national shame” I am not a bit surprised. Seeing the timing of the report before the coming state Assembly elections in five states, the entire exercise seems to be aimed at the electoral prospects. Releasing a report on Hunger and Malnutrition (HUNGaMA) in New Delhi recently, he said: “The problem of malnutrition is a matter of national shame. Despite impressive growth in our GDP, the level of under-nutrition in the country is unacceptably high.” The bigger shame of course is that it took the prime minister seven years in office to feel concerned at the extent of “malnutrition” that prevails among children below 6-years age.
A year back, the international child rights organisation “Save the Children” had come up with a damming report, which probably missed the prime minister’s attention. After all, we can’t blame his office for keeping the prime minister in the dark about the failure of the high-growth trajectory in making any significant reduction in poverty, hunger and malnutrition. Nor did he find anything unusual when the Planning Commission raised the percentage of “below poverty line” population on the recommendation of Suresh Tendulkar committee report.
This happen despite India’s GDP continuously remaining on a high. This is because the entire policy planning, as we know, continues to revolve around opening up for more foreign direct investment, acquiring agricultural land for the industry and providing all kinds of sops and tax-concessions to the industry in the name of ‘policy paralysis’.
The prime minister probably had also missed reading the report of National Family Health Survey III 2005-06 which showed that half of all children in India were under-nourished.
Another damming report “A fair Chance of Life” released in September 2010 did not hit the front pages of prominent newspapers simply because it wasn’t backed by any group of parliamentarians. Nevertheless, it was a shocking indictment of the economic paradigm that actually perpetuates hunger and malnutrition by widening economic disparities. The report said: “Of the 26 million children born every year, approximately 1.83 million died before their fifth birthday”. Half of these children actually die within a month of being born.
Half of the 1.83 million children, who die before their fifth birthday in India, actually die within a month of being born. This is a clear pointer the dismal state of health of the mothers. After all, a newly born malnourished child owes much to the impoverished mother’s health, which in turn points to the inability and inefficiency of the public distribution system to reach food to the poor and the needy. Hunger and malnutrition are closely correlated. Feeding the population is the first requisite to building up a healthy population. Supplementary nutrition programme like the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) can only be effective if first people are adequately fed.
The prime minister is right when he said: “We have believed that a mother’s education level, economic status of the family, provisions of sanitation, status of women and breast-feeding affect children’s nutrition”. Each survey validates these linkages but where is the nationwide programme to fight malnutrition on a war footing?
The ICDS programme, aided by a faltering anganwadi system, is crying for attention. For 37-years now, ICDS has failed miserably to reach anywhere near its objective of ensuring child health and nutrition. It failure can be gauged from the fact that the ICDS programme operates in the 100 districts in which the HUNGAMA survey was done. The deteriorating health of the ICDS programme has to be first addressed before it can be expected to take care of expecting mothers and the children.
Still more importantly is to first understand the crucial ink between growing hunger and malnutrition and the economic policies being perpetuated. Hunger is the result of faulty economic policies which widens the gulf between the haves and have-nots; is the outcome of policies that take away community control over natural resources like water, forests and farmlands; and is also the fallout of neo-liberal policies that removes social security nets and allows corporate takeover of agriculture.
The more the government destroys the very foundations of agriculture forcing farmers to abandon farming and migrate into the urban cities in search of menial jobs, the more is likely to the growth in hunger and malnutrition. Instead of extending what is visibly a mere lip-sympathy to the poor and malnourished, the prime minister needs to recast his economic policies making it pro-people and pro-environment. INAV