Manmohan opts for the poor to starve
By Raja Murthy
MUMBAI - Should unused food be allowed to go to waste or used to feed the
hungry? An unprecedented "order" by India's Supreme Court to Agriculture
Minister Sharad Pawar to distribute food grain free to the poor, instead of
letting millions of tonnes of it rot, has blown up into a core issue, raising
questions about about the balance of judiciary and government, and how should a
government deal with abject poverty.
"I respectfully submit that the Supreme Court should not go into the realm of
policy formulation," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on September 6,
politely telling the court to keep away from what he perceived as exclusive
governmental turf. "It is not possible in this country to give free food to all
the poor people."
Manmohan, disappointingly, missed the point, or pointedly avoided it, during a
80-minute meeting with senior journalists at
his residence in New Delhi on Monday. The Supreme Court order of August 12 had
directed the central government to ensure free distribution of only grain that
would have otherwise rotted in godowns. The government was not asked to feed
for free all the poor across the country, all year. Distribute the grain free
as a "short-term measure", the court had said.
For decades, food wastage has been a serious problem in the country (see
India outsources food-waste woes, Asia Times Online, July 21, 2010),
with US$12.2 billion worth of agricultural produce allowed to rot due to
inadequate government-owned facilities. It was time the referee stepped in.
"Give to the hungry poor instead of it [grains] going down the drain," a
Supreme Court bench of Justices Dalveer Bhandari and Deepak Verma instructed,
responding to public interest litigation on the issue filed by a New
Delhi-based civil rights group, People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL).
PUCL filed the original petition nearly 10 years ago, and the latest Supreme
Court order was its 58th ruling on the issue - in a shameful indictment to
government disinterest in tackling both agricultural wastage and the crisis of
hunger.
India is home to about 25% of the planet's hungry poor, according to the
Rome-based United Nations World Food Program, the world's largest humanitarian
agency fighting hunger.
The hunger crisis and food wastage could find a meeting point. About 55 million
tonnes of grain rot to waste annually in India, according to Colin Gonsalves,
the country's leading civil rights lawyer who is fighting the PUCL case in the
Supreme Court. "And the government refuses to give away for free even a few
crumbs of it to the poorest people. Have we as a nation become so insensitive
and cruel?"
Gonsalves, who in 2004 received the International Human Rights Award from the
Chicago-based American Bar Association, is due on September 24 to file his
response to Prime Minister Manmohan's government rejecting the Supreme Court
order.
Perhaps Manmohan has to be reminded daily that over half the children in India
are malnourished, and about one-quarter are so badly nourished that they have
shrunken brains and stunted bodies.
India's controversial Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar too bluntly dismissed
the free food grain order, offering only to supply to the poor an additional
2.5 million tonnes at subsidized prices through the existing Public
Distribution System.
Pawar has been a leading star in the recurring governmental incompetence for
nearly 10 years. In April 2001, the PUCL sought Supreme Court intervention
against the nationwide food grain wastage to use this wasted stock to feed the
hungry.
The petition was filed after civil rights activists discovered food shortage so
extreme in the western Indian border state of Rajasthan that families in a
poverty-struck village were "rotation eating" - with some members of each
family eating on one day, and remaining family members getting something to eat
the next day. Just five miles away, outside state capital Jaipur, the Food
Corporation of India godowns were overflowing with grain.
The petitioners found the government had about 40 million tonnes of food grain
in excess of the buffer stock of 20 million tonnes, with millions of tonnes of
grain kept outside godowns in the open, and rotting, even as people nearby were
nearly starving.
Gonsalves, who is also executive director of Human Rights Law Network, a
nationwide collective of lawyers and civil rights activists, says the problem
of both hunger and food grain wastage has become worse in the decade he has
fought the cause in the Supreme Court.
In August, the court had asked for wasted food grain to be freely donated to
feed the poor. "The core of the problem is the hostility from the prime
minister and the government to feeding the poor," Gonsalves told Asia Times
Online.
Manmohan and Pawar might find their "hostile" decision worth remembering next
time they sit down to eat for free at their official residences or in another
of the seven-course official banquets, at taxpayer expense.
They might have responded to the court order differently if they had themselves
experienced starvation, known what it is like to have no money to buy food, and
faint from hunger, as this correspondent experienced in an earlier, darker
phase in life.
Like over a billion acutely malnourished people worldwide, Manmohan & Co
would then know that hunger is not some intellectual condition to be measured
through abstract economic theories of which the 78-year old premier is an
expert, having spent 53 years as an economist. His expertise only adds to the
embarrassment of worldwide reports showing his government in shockingly poor
light in tackling hunger.
The latest Global Hunger Index (GHI) of 2009 ranks India a miserable 65th out
of 84 countries in the Index. India marginally improved in the GHI, from 31.7
in 1990 to 23.9 in 2009, but the 2009 GHI places India worse than the likes of
Zimbabwe, Uganda, North Korea and Burma in dealing with hunger.
The hunger crisis offers the most staggering contradiction and shameful
contrast in a country that is Asia's third-largest economy. It mocks India's
status as the world's fourth-largest economy based on a Purchasing Power Parity
(PPP) of $2.9 trillion. Nations and individuals can only evolve for the better
with courage to face such unpleasant realities.
In fact, Bangladesh is the only Asian country ranked lower than India in the
2009 Global Hunger Index. The earlier 2008 GHI said nearly 350 million people
in India suffered from "food insecurity", or were unsure from where their next
meal was coming.
The present situation could be actually worse than shown in the latest index.
The Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute, the
Bonn-based Deutsche Welthungerhilfe (meaning German Agro Action) and Ireland's
Concern Worldwide compile the GHI from surveying the latest available - but at
least two-year-old data - from governments and international agencies.
So the 56-page 2009 Global Hunger Index report reflects the situation in 2007.
Food has gone further beyond the reach of the poorest of poor in India since
then, with the government releasing data in recent weeks to show food prices
rising the highest in 11 years. India reported food inflation of 16.49 % this
July, the highest among developing nations.
Food prices have consistently shot up the past decade. Potatoes, among the
cheapest of vegetables, cost 7.50 rupees (17 US cents) per kilogram in Mumbai
in 2005 - a year after Manmohan first took over as prime minister; their price
has since more than doubled to 16 rupees per kilogram.
Economists blame the food mess for a seriously flawed food management system,
including insufficient storage facilities with rotting grain of a quantity
sufficient to feed 100 million.
But something even more rotten lurks in hearts of politicians who consider it
"national pride" to spend $7 billion for the corruption-ridden Commonwealth
Games which get underway in New Delhi in October, but don't see the national
shame in refusing to donate food, which would otherwise waste away, to starving
people.
More evidence of peculiar economic logic appeared with the central government
doling out free cell phones to 1,000 poverty-stricken families in Phagi village
in Rajasthan. CNN-IBN news channel, reporting the strange event on September
10, quoted baffled recipient Gyarasi Devi asking, "We could have done with some
grain or a job. What will we do with these mobiles?"
Her fellow villager, Govind, replied: "Mobiles will actually add to our
expenses. The food grains in the godowns are rotting. Why can't the government
distribute food grain?"
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