Book excerpt: Dispersed famine in India is hardly ever an election issue

The scale of dispersed and slow-motion famine that afflicts Indian democracy should be an ethical and political scandal, but it’s hardly ever an election issue. In the world’s fifth largest economy, starvation deaths sometimes do cause brief media outrage when they occur, such as the ones in Jharkhand, or when two children died in 2019 in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh after eating mud to quell hunger, or when three sisters died after going hungry for days in the capital Delhi the year before. But a conspiracy of silence by incompetent officials, ephemeral media attention, and the indifference and complacency of well-fed citizens, helps to temper outrage. Avoiding words like starvation—using malnutrition instead—and hiding hunger under the garb of other diseases allow India’s million famines to go untreated, debilitating the social foundations of its democracy.

In 2013, the Parliament enacted the National Food Security Act in response to a civil society movement for universal access to food. It made the right to food a fundamental right by guaranteeing subsidized food grains to about three-quarters of the population. The country still scored a poor 94 (out of 107 nations) in the 2020 Global Hunger Index. This index, based on the extent of undernourishment, underweight children, child stunting, and child mortality, classifies India’s level of hunger as ‘serious’. India shares the rank with Sudan; narrowly beats North Korea (96); fares worse than Congo (91), Nepal (73), Iraq (65), and Sri Lanka (64); and is miles behind China and Brazil (both among the seventeen countries in this index that have low levels of hunger and hence go unranked). The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that 190 million Indians—nearly three times the population of France—are undernourished.

The extent of hunger is doubly scandalous in a country that produces far more than the 225 million tonnes of food it needs to feed its population a year, yet wastes 40 per cent of it. India, in fact, annually wastes as much food as the UK consumes and which would be enough to feed the 100 million people of its poorest state, Bihar, all year. Some 21 million tonnes of wheat are estimated to rot in India every year, equivalent to Australia’s total annual production. Crops are left to rot in the sun without storage or transportation, or eaten by insects and rats in poorly maintained warehouses. State and central governments, irrespective of who’s in power, for as long as can be remembered, announce elaborate plans of building infrastructure for storage and transportation so that food isn’t wasted. Yet hunger continues to kill with impunity and food wasted with abandon.

In 2018, according to UNICEF, India reported 880,000 child deaths under the age of 5. Since no popularly elected government wants to admit starvation deaths, the cause of children’s death is passed off as diseases such as encephalitis or diarrhoea, even though it is mostly hidden starvation—nearly 70 per cent—that robs children of the strength to fight diseases. At least one in two children suffers from deficiency of essential nutrients because of hidden hunger. About 90 per cent of children under the age of 2 don’t get what UNICEF considers a minimum acceptable diet. As a result, a third of the country’s children, 46.6 million, are stunted. Even though stunting has been declining in past decades, that still makes India the country with the highest number of stunted children. It accounts for more than a third of the global total, with the incidence of stunting higher in the poorer northern and eastern states and among lower castes. A new government survey now finds that stunting has been on the rise again since 2015, reversing earlier progress. The country also has 20 million ‘wasted’ children (who have low weight for height as a result of muscle wasting from hunger), half of the world’s total. More than a fifth of its children are wasted, the highest rate for any country. According to the Hunger Index, the prevalence of wasting has also increased since 2015. Nearly 60 per cent of India’s children are anaemic. So are 53 per cent of women of reproductive age, with much greater percentages for Dalit and tribal women. That sets in motion a cycle of death, impairment, and poor life chances for millions of Indians even before they are born. A third of children under 5 are malnourished. Those who survive early low-intensity starvation face a lifetime of deprivation as chronic hunger adversely affects learning, employability, and earnings. Two-thirds of India’s working population were stunted as children.

Despite the damage done to social life, hunger finds little mention in the country’s political discourse. Election campaigns are not fought over hunger, nor do governments fall for failing to break its deathly grip. Gujarat, one of the richest states, had more than 380,000 malnourished children as of February 2020, according to the state government. The number had actually jumped 140,000 in six months. Gujarat tops the list of Indian states in terms of child wasting. More than 20 per cent of its children show low birth weight, 40 per cent are stunted, 33.5 per cent underweight, and 62 per cent anaemic. But Gujarat also has had the same party in power since 2001. Hungry children are never a political problem. Far from it. So successful is the supposed ‘Gujarat model’ of economic growth and development that Modi, who ruled the state for a dozen years, was rewarded with national power for his sterling show in the state. That’s how invisible hunger is.

India shows how modern so-called democracies fitted out with supposedly free elections and notionally free media can be surprisingly tolerant of hunger in less visible, more geographically dispersed and slow-motion forms. Of late, hunger has reappeared in comparatively rich democracies such as the United Kingdom and the United States as well. Doctors are warning that in the United Kingdom, nearly one in five children under 15 now live in a home where parents cannot afford to put food on the table. In the United States, over 12 million children live in food-insecure homes, and 22 million children rely on free or subsidized lunch at school. Millions of children are left underfed when schools are closed in summer, as the summer meal programme run by the federal government reaches just 4 million pupils.

In India, the highly subsidized prices of food grains sold through the public distribution system nominally targets the poor but creates a dual-price system that gives corrupt intermediaries, such as fair price shop owners and government officials, a strong incentive to divert grains to the open market. As a result, India records a leakage of more than 40 per cent in its public distribution system. The scope for profiteering creates powerful networks comprising state and nonstate poligarchs at local levels with a convergent stake to profit from hunger, and hiding it. They are heavily responsible for the damage done to the social footings of Indian democracy. Local administrations never admit starvation deaths. On the rare occasion that such information leaks out, the usual media circus and political blame  games follow, devoid of context. All this helps dramatize events but doesn’t lead to any awareness of the structural defects underlying crucial public issues, or a public conversation about their mitigation. The drama is heightened by the adversarial media frames of political battles. The opposition demands the government’s head. The story gains traction. More people pay attention to the event and debate it, but the talking point isn’t hunger, it’s the performance of the government, specifically the chief minister. The government swiftly moves to manage the headlines. It denies and disproves the role of hunger in the reported deaths. The office-hungry opposition is thwarted. A ratings-starved media moves on to the next big story. Hunger is forgotten till the next hunger death surfaces. In a perverse way, the political stigma attached to starvation deaths allows its perpetuation. The very mechanisms of democracy that are supposed to guard against mass hunger, namely free media and competitive multiparty politics, become complicit in its reproduction. Low-intensity chronic hunger continues, out of sight. Until, that is, a pestilence and widespread joblessness come calling, and it becomes difficult to be kept hidden anymore.