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Zia Haq, Associate Editor, picks his favourite read of 2020
Hunger’s haunting tale, bluntly told
It is a profound irony that 200 million Indians sleep on an empty stomach in the world’s largest producer of milk and edible oils, and the second-largest grower of wheat and sugar. At any time of the year, there is a surplus buffer of grains. The government has to often struggle to reduce stocks in bulging granaries to create room for more. Never since the green revolution of the 1960s has India had a truly food-deficit year.
Why India figures among 29 countries with the highest levels of hunger, stunted children, and poorly fed women is no longer a puzzle. Much work has gone into understanding it. Jean Drèze, the Belgium-born economist influential among Indian policymakers, has gone to astonishing lengths to experience hunger firsthand. While teaching at Delhi University, Drèze headed off to a stricken slum in Delhi. The first thing he did there was to find out what the poorest dweller ate, a diet he adopted as his own. As a result, he lost several pounds, but gained an unbearable insight into why, despite record food output, one-sixth of India goes hungry. It is not a problem of food shortage, but of equitable food distribution.
Harsh Mander, the author of Ash in the Belly, has fought a long battle to put an end to this -- as a former bureaucrat, a member of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council and as a food security campaigner. While cutting-edge work on the linkages between hunger, poverty and policy -- such as those by Amartya Sen -- can be too much for the general reader to grapple with, Ash... is a good place to start for those wanting to know why India can’t feed itself. It’s a story told not by those analyzing policies, but by one of those responsible for framing them. As with all stories, the plot lies in the people. Mander alternates between prosaic commentary and a life-cycle tale of hunger told by real-life characters. Whether of Indradeep from Bolangir or a 90-year-old widow, Thirumatamma, in Andhra Pradesh, it’s a “cradle-to-cremation” story, to use the author’s phrase.
The pathways of hunger span from city streets to the tribal outback. Like Holocaust-denial, Indian officials habitually deny starvation. Tens of thousands requiring food aid are routinely counted out. At Rs 4,000 or so a month, poverty benchmarks are set so absurdly low that few would get by. Among the many evils, Mander rightly identifies the gravest of all: a government focused more on saving money, not its hungry people.
