Hunger, Poverty and Democracy in India

SHIBSANKAR JENA
In one of the most shocking revelations to hit the nation, it recently came to light that 42 percent of the malnourished children in the world live in India and that 92 percent of the mothers here are not even aware about healthcare systems available for them and their babies or their rights. These, as per the HUNGAMA Report released by Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh on 10 January, 2012. The Prime Minister admits that the disturbing statistic is a national shame. With this shocker still fresh in the mind, in a debate telecast on NDTV on 27 Jan, Justice Kurtzy mentioned that on an average, 47 farmers commit suicide in India every day. The two realities bring to the public sphere, a debate relating to the journey of Indian democracy and development since 1950.
Although there may be a doubts cast by intellectuals, civil society and others on the nature of the data, the very conceptualization of malnutrition and hunger and the methodology of the survey, what cannot be denied is that India is the largest contributor to hunger in the world. It was Mahatma Gandhi who first dreamt of a hunger-free India and it was the first Prime Minister of the nation, Pandit Nehru who said children were the future of India and that the country should think of how to capitalize human resources. Sixty-three years of democracy and development since, it is accepted that almost half of India’s energy, intelligence and the human productivity is going waste, despite many schemes, plans and developmental programmes initiated by both the central and state governments.
Whose fault is this? Government and politics? Bureaucracy? Or the society itself?
The answer could be approached from any of the three sides, but the HUNGAMA survey says it is largely due to the traditional socio-cultural practices and lack of education and awareness among the rural population. In other words, the main problem lies on the ground, not in the governance and bureaucratic approach. According to MP Sachin Pilot who is one of the members of this Citizen’s Alliance which commissioned the HUNGAMA Report, the problem can be solved through proper co-ordination and active participation of Gram Panchayats, Aangan Wadi and NGOs.
Is this a right way to tackle this problem? Are awareness programmes and strengthening of Gram panchayats and Aangan wadi enough to solve the problem?
I do not believe so, because, the interpretation of the HUNGAMA findings is not accurate. Malnourishment is not only due to socio-cultural practices like the patriarchal ideology in the family or due to the lack of awareness, but also due to the growing marginalization of the poor in the global market system, high rate of exploitation of the marginalized people by some local market agency nexuses, rapid decline in food crop cultivation to cash crop production which leads to the food insecurity and the negligence of the government to give top priority towards children’s issue and mother healthcare systems, and also inefficient bureaucratic implementation and corruption.
Although our Constitution’s framers had seen a dream of Indian society without Hunger, Inequality or Poverty, it is the ideology of politics through which development issues have been determined. Now we accord higher priority to the reservation policy, market expansion, building dams, industry etc in pursuit of higher profits and leverage to influence people for votes. Issues likes hunger, malnourishment, maternal healthcare etc are given lesser priority because they have lesser impact on voting behavior.
Another important contributor to the high rate of malnourished children in India is the rapid increasing of food insecurity and declining of food sovereignty. Food insecurity is due to increasing addiction among growers for cash-crop production. The introduction of cash crops also destabilizes the food sovereignty through mono-cropping systems where people are forgetting their local ways of production and consumption.
In this context, I would like to cite one example from my research work in Bolangir district of Orissa. This district, along with the districts of Kalahandi and Koraput (in the popular discourse of development, called “KBK”), is the largest contributor to hunger and poverty in India. This region is recognized as dry land area with drought prone region. Traditionally, this region developed a system of mixed cropping (for example rice with mug cultivation) to tackle the drought. The logic was that if there was low rainfall, rice production will be low but mug production would be high and enough to tide over the drought. But the introduction of cotton farming in the Eighties led to a decline in the traditional farming system and most of the farmers started to grow cotton as the market value of cotton was high. This caused a huge disturbance in the local agrarian system as most of the big farmers and land owners switched to cotton farming and in doing so, also took away the lands they had earlier given to tenant farmers. This resulted in the disintegration of the social structure in the region and triggered mass migration of the poor to the cities like Chennai, Mumbai and Hyderabad seeking manual labour jobs. At the same time, there was also a deskilling of the farmers who gradually forgot the indigenous farming systems and started to depend on fertilizers and modern methods of cultivation.
The present situation of this region is very pathetic with the land which has been used for cotton cultivation lying fallow because it has lost its fertility. Due to this, most of the smaller farmers have lost out and are looking for alternative jobs for survival. To take the profit of this situation, there are some local agents (locally called as Dallals) deployed by the brick making companies based in Chennai and Hyderabad who arrive in the region, contact the farmers, pay lump sum money like Rs. 10,000 or 15,000 during the farming season to buy the entire family as labourer to work in brick kilns. These farmers take the money as it is essential to invest in agriculture. After the end of the agricultural season they move to these brick kilns and work without pay as bonded labour. The sad irony is that every individual has to produce at least 300 bricks a day irrespective of how long they have to toil for it. One of my respondents informed me that most of the elderly in the family had died due to this overwork. This is the highest form of exploitation under which an entire family of five members is bonded to produce Rs. 900 worth of bricks per person everyday for a collective remuneration of Rs, 10,000-15,000. One brick sells for Rs. 3 in the market.
This is one of the major factors not only in this district but in the entire KBK collection of three districts of Orissa which has created a vicious poverty cycle. As a result this, the region suffers from hunger and produces a large number malnourished children. A regular report featured in Oriya newspapers is of parents from this region selling their children for meager amounts. This fact can be interpreted in two ways; Firstly, these families, due to their poor economic condition, are unable to feed their children, so that they have no option but to sell them away, secondly, by selling their children they get some money to maintain their remaining family. Taking this reality into consideration, can we still believe that it is largely socio-cultural practices and lack of awareness which produces malnourished children or do we begin to accept that it is largely due to poverty, exploitation and the marketisation of production?
[The Writer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Systems and Anthropology, Sikkim University]