By Irudhaya Jothi SJ
Ragabpur, October 15, 2019: Starvation has killed more Dalits and Adivasis than people of other communities in India, according to the Right To Food Campaign.
The campaign has prepared a data sheet of the details of starvation deaths as reported in the mainstream media from 2015 to 2019 and it was verified by an independent fact-finding team.
In the last five years, the country has reported 86 starvation deaths, half of them in 2018 and 2019. As many as 83 starvation deaths occurred among the Dalit and Adivasi communities.
Common reasons for the deaths include losing one’s ration card or pension for lack of Aadhaar linking, and failure of Aadhaar-based biometric authentication (ABBA), which is compulsory in several states.
October 16 is the World Food Day. It aims to achieve ‘zero hunger’ by addressing the hunger, nourishing people and nurturing the planet. The World Food Day calls for action across all sectors to make healthy and sustainable diets affordable and accessible to everyone.
The usual understand of hunger is the distress associated with a lack of sufficient calories. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations defines food deprivation, or undernourishment, as the consumption of too few calories to provide the minimum amount of dietary energy that each individual requires living a healthy and productive life, given that person’s sex, age, stature and physical activity.
The World Food Day is for action dedicated to tackling global hunger. People across the gather together on this day to declare their commitment to eradicating hunger from the globe.
The FAO says more than 820 million people worldwide suffer chronic undernourishment, 60 percent women and almost 5 million children under the age of five die of malnutrition-related causes every day. At the same time more than 670 million adults and 120 million people in the age groups of 5 to 19 are obese.
An unhealthy diet is the leading risk factor for many non-communicable diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and certain cancers.
On the one hand, India is forecast to overtake the United Kingdom to become the world’s fifth-largest economy this year and projected to surpass Japan to feature at the second position in the Asia-Pacific region by 2025. On the other, in the 2019 the Global Hunger Index India ranks 103 among 119 countries. India suffers from a level of hunger that considered ‘serious.’
The World Bank estimates that India ranks high among countries where children suffer from malnutrition. The prevalence of underweight children in India is among the highest in the world. And it is nearly double that of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Rural poor are malnourished and underweight while the women are anemic. The schemes that supposed to remedy these maladies are not that effective as yet to raise the level of malnourishment in children and anemic women.
Of all these rural women and children the most affected are the Dalits and Adivasi women and children.
October brings a seasonal hunger for poor agrarian societies in India as it is the period after sowing and before harvest. It is a time of great hardship, says Anuradha Talwar, Human Rights activist and convener of Right To Food Campaign West Bengal.
Families have put all their resources into the sowing, and they wait desperately for the harvest to recoup their investment. Food scarcity increases food prices. Rains mean very little vegetables are available and whatever is available is highly-priced.
There is little work available in agriculture once the sowing is over. Other works on construction sites and brick kilns stop during the rains. To top it all, diarrhea and skin diseases afflict people. It is time of hunger and disease, Talwar say.
It is said the federal government has not allocated enough funds toward food subsidy in the budget, forcing Food Corporation of India (FCI) to borrow from other sources, mainly National Small Saving Funds and in the last five years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi rule, FCI’s debt tripled to 26.5 million rupees.
On the one hand, some vehemently deny any suggestion of starvation and economic crisis even sighting the sale of a single day cinema tickets. On the other eminent economists such as Nobel Prize for Economics 2019 winner Abhijit Banerjee calling the fall in consumption as “extremely serious issue.”
The second goal of Sustainable Development agenda seeks to end hunger and all forms of malnutrition and double agricultural productivity in the next 15 years. Unfortunately, India has misplaced priorities on agricultural productivity and arresting hunger and malnutrition. The country witnesses farmers’ suicides and starvation deaths in the land of billion possibilities and dreams.
What is required, according to Talwar, is pro-active intervention in the lives of rural small and big farmers with needed loan waiver and minimum support prices for the produce and proper implementation of food schemes.
The World Food day is yet another reminder to the government to wake up to the realities in rural India and invest in the poor just as he does for the corporates so we can save the Dalit and Adivasi from starvation death, Talwar says.