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print versionThe Sunday Magazine / The Hindu, April 05, 2009
The silent tragedy of hunger
It is the State’s responsibility to be proactive about hunger and malnutrition which still survive despite surging economic growth and agricultural production.
In the dark shadows of this land, a silent tragedy plays out for millions of women and men, boys and girls, who sleep hungry. The experience of chronic hunger in distant villages of India, as much as on its city streets, is one of intense avoidable suffering: of self-denial; of learning to live with far less than the body needs; of minds and bodies stymied in their growth; of the agony of helplessly watching one’s loved ones — most heartbreakingly children — in hopeless torment; of unpaid, arduous devalued work; of shame, humiliation and bondage; of the defeat and the triumph of the human spirit.
Such high levels of hunger and malnutrition are a paradox, because they stubbornly survive surging economic growth and agricultural production which outpaces the growth of population (although it has worryingly stagnated in recent years). The riddle deepens because the State in India runs some of the largest and most ambitious food schemes in the world. The persistence of widespread hunger is the cumulative outcome of public policies that produce and reproduce impoverishment; of failures to invest in agriculture, especially in poorer regions of India and for rain-fed and small farmers; of unacknowledged and unaddressed destitution; of embedded gender, caste, tribe, disability and stigma which construct tall social barriers to accessing food; but, in the last analysis, it is the result of a profound collapse of governance.
The colonial Famine Codes — developed since the 1880s to codify and prescribe State responses to cataclysmic famines which took tens of thousands of lives — continue to cast a long shadow over responses of the State to hunger, even though both the nature of famine and the political economy of the State have been completely transformed in free India. State authorities continue to regard starvation as a temporary aberration caused by rainfall failures rather than as an element of daily lives. The effort remains to craft minimalist responses, to spend as little money as is absolutely necessary to keep people threatened with food shortages alive. And the duties of State officials are not legally binding, in ways that they cannot be punished for letting citizens live with and die of hunger.
Typical response
Allegations of starvation deaths are typically met with official denials and the blaming of the victims. Public servants believe mistakenly that death from consuming no food whatsoever is the only “proof†of starvation. But starvation is a condition of not just the dead but the living, and people who have lived with prolonged food denials mostly succumb not directly to starvation, but to health conditions which they would have easily survived had they been adequately nourished. There are seamless lines between dying of and living with starvation, prolonged food denials, malnutrition, and the subjective experience of hunger. Starvation is closely related to the equally neglected phenomenon of destitution, in which people lack even the minimal economic means for bare survival. The State must acknowledge these conditions, identify people threatened by them, and address and prevent the enormous and avoidable toll of suffering, sickness and death that they entail.
Public policy — and even much of civic action and mainstream academia — do not adequately acknowledge or address the unconscionable reality of the unrelentingly precarious, lonely, humiliating and uncertain existence of women and men, boys and girls who grapple with critical hunger, chronic food denials and starvation as a part of their lived everyday experience. If their suffering is admitted, they tend to be blamed for it, as the “undeserving†non-working “unemployable†poor.
Destitute people are those who almost completely lack the resources (financial and material), the employment, assets, access to credit, and social and family support and networks which are required to secure the means for dignified survival. These are men and women, girls and boys who are powerless and disenfranchised, socially isolated and devalued, sometimes stigmatised and even illegalised, and often with special needs born out of disability, illness, social standing and age.
For large numbers of these forgotten people who live routinely and precariously at the edge of survival, each day comes afresh with the danger of one push that will send them hurtling over the precipice. This may come from an external emergency, like a natural disaster, epidemic or riot, but even from local crises: a sickness in the family, a sudden untimely death of a breadwinner, or a brush with the law. These people who live on a regular basis in constant peril of slipping into starvation — or at least chronic, long-term, unaddressed hunger — may be described as destitute.
Excluding the destitute
Karl Marx wrote evocatively of the exclusion of destitute populations from what he described as “political economy†: “Political economy does not recognise the unoccupied worker… The beggar, the unemployed, the starving [and] the destitute are figures which exist not for it, but only for the eyes of doctors, judges, gravediggers and beadles. Nebulous… figures which do not belong within the province of political economy.†Incidentally, Marx was right about their exclusion, but not about their being “unoccupied workers†. On the contrary, we have found that the destitute are forced to labour in arduous, low-paid, undignified work in order even to stay barely alive as each new day dawns.
The destitution and helplessness of highly marginalised groups do not arise from low incomes or even from their own intrinsic and irrevocable biological infirmities (such as of age and disability), but from the fact that in many cases these infirmities are externally imposed by social arrangements themselves. People may be barred from access to food even if it is locally available and they have the economic means. These social barriers to food security may include gender, caste, race, disability or stigmatised ailments.
The expulsion of those who most need it from support and succour, from care and rights — often by their own families, by local communities, but most importantly by the State — requires us to identify those classes, social categories and local communities who are destitute and socially expelled. Even in the more intimate context of a village, many of these socially excluded groups are invisible, barely known or acknowledged. In most contemporary cultural contexts, social categories that consistently tend to be highly dispossessed and vulnerable in their access to food include disabled people, both as breadwinners and as dependants; single women and the households that they head; aged people, especially those who are left behind when their families migrate or who are not cared for by their grown children; people with stigmatised and debilitating ailments such as TB, HIV AIDS and leprosy; working and out-of-school children; and bonded workers. In addition, in diverse cultural and socio-economic contexts others may be added, such as certain denotified and nomadic tribes (these are communities who were notified by colonial rulers as “criminal tribes†and often continue to suffer from this stigma, even though they have been officially “denotified†by the government of free India) in one place, some specially disadvantaged dalit groups like Musahars or Madigas in another, weavers, artisans and particularly disadvantaged minority groups in yet another, all designated as “primitive tribal groups†, survivors of conflict and internal displacement, and many other diverse forgotten people. Many of them are of contested citizenship.
On the bridge between the rural and the urban destitute are the distress migrants, at the bottom of the heap, both where they move for work and from where they come. In urban contexts are street children, with or without responsible adult caregivers, urban homeless people, slum-dwellers and a wide range of unorganised workers, both seasonal migrants and settlers, such as rickshaw pullers, porters, loaders, construction workers and small vendors, and people dependent on begging.
Inadequate measures
Government programmes are woefully inadequate to address destitution; in fact, they tend to be blind to or in denial of the fact that large numbers of people lack even the elementary means and power to survive with dignity. It is stressed that this is a duty of the State, not to the dead but to the precariously living. It requires public vigilance about individuals, communities and several categories living with starvation and absolute hunger. It requires the State to act, not after there is an emergency like a drought or flood, not even after people die of starvation, but proactively, before people slip into destitution and fail to access, in an assured and reliable manner, with dignity, the nutritious and culturally appropriate food they require to lead healthy lives.
Gandhi offered us a “talisman†to use in moments of doubt and confusion. He asked us to recall the face of the poorest, most defenceless, most powerless man we have encountered. (Today he would have recognised that she would probably have been a woman!) We must ask ourselves whether what we are attempting has meaning for this person: does it touch her life with dignity and worth? Does it augment her power and self-reliance? If it does, it must surely be the right thing to do. It is this talisman that we need to hold up to public policy in the glittering world of vast reservoirs of darkness today.
