[Reader-list] RTF (Right to Food) Articles - 14

[Rakesh Iyer]

Source: The Hindu

Date: Friday, Jul 12, 2002

Link: http://www.hinduonnet.com/2002/07/12/stories/2002071201301000.htm

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* Life and death *

 EVERY NOW AND then India is brutally reminded that its citizens can still
die of starvation. A year after starvation deaths were reported from
Kashipur in Orissa, come reports of similar deaths from Palamau district of
Jharkhand. Now as then, the poor in the area had been surviving by consuming
herbs and leaves collected from the wild before their wretched lives were
finally brought to an end by starvation. This is a complete failure of
governance in the most fundamental sense. If the past is any guide, then the
final outcome of this episode will be that a period of political and public
anger will end once again with governance returning to its normal state of
inadequacy and public concern returning to its usual insensitivity. The ebb
and flow of the agenda on the most basic of rights, the right to food, has
been demonstrated so clearly in the past year. The Government's food
mountain of 60 million tonnes was the focus of public discourse after the
Kashipur deaths in August 2001, but the issue quickly faded from the public
consciousness even as grain continued to accumulate in godowns. The crime of
allowing even one death due to starvation is as serious today as it was a
year ago, perhaps more, considering that Government food stocks on June 1
were as much as 65 million tonnes compared to 61 million tonnes at the same
time last year.

The country can claim that there is no mass starvation, though it does not
need mentioning that malnutrition remains a major problem. Starvation,
however, is a constant threat in parts of eastern and central India as also
in remote pockets in other States. That deaths due to starvation occur only
in a few areas and that too not regularly is hardly defensible on moral or
administrative grounds. It is precisely the remote, the poorly-endowed, the
backward and the regions where work is scarce that should be the focus of
(Central and State) Government attention. In Manatu block of Palamau
district, where starvation deaths have been reported, citizens' groups have
through a detailed survey brought out that the public distribution system
(PDS) is more absent than present. The Supreme Court may have directed in
November 2001 that all States should institute the national mid-day meal
programme in schools by January 2002, but the scheme is non-operational in
this area. In Kusumatand village where three people died of starvation, no
resident had received any grain under the below the poverty line scheme of
the PDS. And allocation through the Antyodaya programme, which provides
grain at highly subsidised prices to the poorest of the poor, was lower than
the norm and those lucky to hold these cards were paying much more than they
should have. Clearly, while the Central and State Governments may announce
any number of welfare programmes, these either do not exist on the ground or
are a source of corruption in the very areas that they are needed the most.

A number of attempts have been made over the past year to tinker with the
PDS. This has taken the form of either formulating new schemes (such as
Antyodaya) or rolling back some of the more extreme decisions of the past
(such as raising prices for the non-poor to open market levels). From the
narrow point of containing the bloating of food stocks, some of these
measures have helped at the margin. But for these and other steps such as
the sale of grain at subsidised prices to exporters, stocks would today have
been closer to 75 million tonnes. While the financial costs of
ever-increasing food stocks do have to be dealt with, there is a larger
social responsibility as well. This is where both the Centre and the
Government of Jharkhand have exhibited a colossal failure by having access
to millions of tonnes of food and yet being unable to provide grain to
people for whom this is a matter of life and death.

 * *