Pulling India Out Of Poverty Pit

‘Hungry India Prays for Rain’, a headline in The Times, London, deeply embarrassed me during my first trip out in the 197Os. The reality was not unknown. But it hit hard as it needed explaining to foreign friends who would wonder: India won a war in 1971, but how come its people remain hungry?

Half-a-century hence, India still prays for rain. Dependent on the monsoon cycle, it swings between droughts and floods, at times visited by both in some regions. Home to rivers, big and small, but divided into adversarial states, India has failed to share available water resources.

But India is no longer ‘hungry’. Two ‘revolutions’, ‘Green’ (food and farm), and ‘White’ (milk) have made all the difference. No reports of starvation death have come for many years. ‘Extreme’ poverty, it is now claimed, has reduced to less than one percent.

India is better-off in a world where over 735 million people live in extreme poverty, on less than $1.90 a day. But, extreme poverty isn’t just about economic hardship and lack of opportunity. It also leads to malnutrition, chronic illness, disease, violence and abuse. India’s record is mixed.

In the 2021 Global Hunger Index, India ranks 101st out of the 116 countries with sufficient data to calculate 2021 GHI scores. With a score of 27.5, India has a level of hunger that is still serious.

Poverty persists, no matter how high India flies with its burgeoning list of billionaires, its economy growing, its trade scaling top positions of many items, including in food et al. 

From a country that imported and even received free food (remember the American PL 480?), India’s food grain exports are impressive enough to make it a food-giver to the world. Wheat exports alone have risen from 200,000 tons to hit record 7.85 million tonnes in 2021-22. There is food security, even though the consumer does not always benefit as several factors determine retail prices.

No longer left to “God’s will” poverty remains a sensitive issue. India grappled with it even when colonized. Dadabhai Naoroji damned the British rule in his scathing book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, something Shashi Tharoor does today, embarrassing Britons – only slightly, if at all. Naoroji, who died in 1917, would have damned the British again had he witnessed the Great Bengal Famine of the 1940s, caused by just one man – Winston Churchill.

India could then blame the British, but felt responsible post-Independence to have what is called the “Great Indian Poverty Debate.” It remained a hotly contested topic in the statistical as well as the political realm. Garibi Hatao was the slogan on which Indira Gandhi won her parliamentary election in 1971.

The debate accelerated through the 1990s, post-liberalisation. The claim that India’s extreme poverty reduced from 36 per cent to 26 per cent of the population thanks to the economic reforms generated several academic studies.

In 2009, economist Suresh Tendulkar’s report furthered the debate by including expenses on healthcare and education as part of poverty determination. This report set ₹4,824 and ₹3,904 as the urban and rural monthly income levels for a family of five as the poverty baseline. It triggered one of the earliest loud discussions in the then-nascent Indian social media.

Narrating the evocative debate’s time-line, economist-diplomat Aashish Chandorkar quotes late journalist Anil Padmanabhan who wrote in the Mint newspaper in 2013 – “The business of fixing poverty runs into billions of dollars and there is obviously a lot at stake if poverty is no longer the country’s primary social and developmental challenge.”

The “great Indian debate” has been revived this month. Two different estimates of poverty and inequality were published by authors affiliated to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). The IMF one, co-authored by its Executive Director for India, Surjeet Bhalla, with Karan Bhasin and Arvind Virmani, places the population still suffering extreme poverty at 0.8 percent, while the one for WB says it is 1.4 percent.

The World Bank paper’s title is self-explanatory. “Poverty in India has declined over the last decade but not as much as previously thought,” Sutirtha Sinha Roy and Roy van der Weide argue in their paper. While the levels may vary, the conclusions on the trend in poverty reduction, although reached through the use of varying data and methodology, are not very different.

Both conclude that poverty reduction has slowed down in the last seven years of the present NDA government compared to the 10-year period of 2004-2014 of the UPA. While Bhalla reports 26 million people moving out of poverty every year during the UPA regime, this number is one third at 8.6 million for the NDA government. In terms of percentage point per annum (PPA) reduction in poverty, it is 2.5 PPA for the UPA declining to one fourth at 0.7 PPA for the current NDA.

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Both are being hotly contested on several counts. Most controversial, perhaps, is in IMF study that concludes that India eradicated extreme poverty even before the 2020-21 Corona-19 pandemic.

Those who disagree, argue that the economic growth had declined well before the pandemic, from 8 percent in 2016-17 to 3.6 percent in 2019-20. Unemployment had increased. Ten million people turned jobless migrants. Real wage growth declined. How could the poverty have declined at the bottom?

While the broad conclusion of a sharp slowdown in poverty reduction during the present NDA government compared to the UPA period may be valid, there are differences in the level and extent of poverty reduction claimed, with some studies actually showing a rise in poverty. The real issue is not just what happened to poverty and inequality but also what factors contributed to poverty reduction.

There appears to be a consensus that many of the initiatives during the UPA era, including the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MNREG) programme and the Food Security Act have contributed to improvement in the lives of the poor, pulling them out of poverty pit. Bhalla also agrees and documents the stellar role of the in-kind transfers through the subsidised food scheme under the Public Distribution System (PDS).

The expansion of the PDS during the pandemic certainly contributed to reducing the misery of the poor who suffered through a sharp slowdown of the economy and the subsequent disruption in economic activity during the pandemic. This calls for strengthening the social safety nets and expenditure on food and livelihood schemes given the challenge of economic recovery coupled with rising inflation.

The IMF study assumes that the ‘in-kind’ food grain transfers to the poor can be tabulated in monetary terms since those who have food in surplus can barter it or sell it. Is this really possible when economic conditions are adverse for a rural beneficiary?

Finally, one is tempted to make a political comment. Much of the poverty alleviation is attributed to the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY), which is currently in its fourth edition. Welcoming that with a hearty applause, one is tempted to recall rejection by the present rulers of past poverty alleviation welfare measures, named after one set of leaders, as ‘doles’ that denied the recipient ‘dignity’. Does the change of label now ‘dignify’ a ‘dole’?

The writer can be reached at mahendraved07@gmail.com

A Food-Tech Startup Amid Pandemic

‘As A Food Startup, My Goal Lies In A Hunger-Free India’

Sakshi Guha, 34, founder and owner of Bengali Love Café, Gurgaon, who has been nominated as a ‘Covid-19 Soldier’ shares her story and her objectives

Mine is a Slumdog millionaire story: A girl who came out of a humble household, founded a food-tech startup amid pandemic, with zero financial support from anyone, and made a fortune big enough to support many other unlettered women. Today, Bengali Love Café, my one-year-old venture, distributes free meals to the less privileged, gives out educational kits to poor students, holds tree plantation campaigns and trains women in business skills.

I came to Gurgaon from Muzaffarnagar, a small town, for work and better opportunities. When I lost my job during raging Covid-19, I decided to start my own business set up. I noticed during those tough times that even well-to-do families were hard put in arranging meals; restaurants had shut shop, housemaids had left to their native places, and the disease caused fatigue.

Hence I along with my mother, Deepa Guha, started a tiffin service by distributing leaflets in and around our locality in the hope of getting customers for our service. It was a bona fide startup. We took money from those who could afford and provided free meals to those who could not.

There were all types of meals, of course it included traditional Bengali food, and several interesting options different from the regular fare. The food was freshly cooked, and delivered to the doorsteps of our patrons.

To save costs, we grew fresh and chemical-free vegetables at our own kitchen garden. All spices used for cooking are also home made by our women team members. This helped us maintain hygiene as well as keep them cost effective. We promoted zero-food-waste policy and decided to donate the extra food to the needy.

Guha with her mother (left) and other team members of Bengal Love Cafe

As business grew, we found pleasure in serving the isolated people, families of Covid patients, PG (paying guest) students, youth workers, corporate employees and senior citizens. Our good intentions clicked. We made enough profits to set off a bigger objective: a hunger-free future.

As per recent update, about 194 million people in India today do not have enough food to eat, the largest number in the world. According to the Global Hunger Index 2020, India falls under the ‘serious’ hunger category with a rank of 94 among 107 countries. These statistics do not take into account the effects of Covid-19. The resultant migration, unemployment and loss of earning members of households has pushed millions of Indians into extreme poverty and hunger.

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We believe that satisfying hunger is not an issue of charity. It’s a matter of justice. It is our true attempt to liberate ourselves as a community. We launched a Feed India, one-time meal, campaign under Bengali Love Cafe Foundation. We are glad to share we have being able to help more than 30,000 people across India so far. Though this is just a beginning. People from different cities are joining our campaign through social media channels and promoting the same.

Focus is around taking action against hunger by kindling the spirit of fulfilment through giving while reducing wastage of food. As we all know in food tech business majority of food get wastage daily either by walking customer or by staff but we manage to minimize it to zero wastage.

As Told To Mamta Sharma

Because Hunger Doesn’t Sell

Hunger is a cliché from the past which no one wants to talk or write about, or show on screen. It is as if it does not really exist. Except in annual global reports, where the statistical index is too impersonal and distant. This is authentic alienation of the post-modern kind.

Even in the social media in India, this huge human crisis suddenly erupted when the desperate mass exodus of tens of thousands of migrant workers was out there on the highways and streets, like a scene from an old war movie, or Partition, or, simply, as the aftermath of a famine. For the mainstream media and society, hunger is hidden and invisible, like these great mass of workers, their faces, bodies and families, and their imagined homelands and infinite struggles, stoicism and suffering. It is hardly listed as one of the top stories in any daily editorial briefing, least of all in contemporary times.

Post liberalization, it  has been, in a systematic way, turned into a remote abstraction, as if it does not exist, with prime time TV shows, shopping malls, fast highways and flyovers, and swanky cars capturing our gaze. Hunger is neither a priority nor an attractive oral or textual narrative. It does not sell.

There is hardly any reporter’s notebook, camera or statistics which is choosing to capture the cracked mirror of emaciated intestines, or measuring the abysmally low calories, the mass stunting of children due to malnutrition, the wasting of bodies, and abject and rampant malnourishment or undernourishment, especially that of girls and mothers in poor households. Neither the hunger of the body nor the hunger of the soul is indeed measured by the post-modern measurements of progress and development.

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Satyajit Ray’s adaptation of Munshi Premchand’s Sadgati was not only about exploitation and feudal oppression in an entrenched casteist society loaded in favour of the upper castes. It was also about hunger, fatigue, prolonged malnutrition, hard, bonded labour. Ray’s Pather Panchali, also a story of stark poverty and forced displacement and migration, is also about food snatched from nature, just that bit to eat, and a sweet loving home full of memories given away to its ravaged future, even as a snake enters the empty house while their bullock cart moves away into the grey horizon. This was the cinema of realism, like the early cinema in Bollywood and its soulful lyrics and songs — life on the streets, homeless and hungry, life inside slums, sanitary pipelines, on footpaths. In black and white.

A still from Do Bigha Zameen

One decade before Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen, the Bengal famine across both sides of the undivided border, in 1943-44, and killed around 3 million people. If you see the pictures of the times, you might just about end up not eating for days. Indeed, there was relentless starvation, and universal injustice. However, there was also mass displacement and forced migration, huge unemployment and scarcity in both rural and urban areas, homelessness, and lack of sanitation, a slow and steady death.

So how are the vast millions of the jobless, migrant workers, the homeless, the landless labourers, daily wagers now living hand-to-mouth, their children, mothers and daughters in the unorganized sector of 93 per cent workforce in India without any trade union or fundamental rights, majority of them Dalits, poor Muslims, from extremely backward castes, and adivasis — how are they coping with the post-lockdown, pandemic reality? For all you know, hunger might kill more people than the disease, thereby becoming yet another invisible epidemic in countries like India. The slow, silent, unseen killer.

The central government, which cared little for the millions walking under a scorching sun after the lockdown, has declared that it has no real data on the migrant workers. Indeed, it says that it has no real data either on health workers, doctors and nurses who have perished as frontline Corona warriors. So when the government does not have data, how shall we document the local hunger index among the vast population of the poor and jobless?

The Global Hunger Index 2020 report released recently has ranked India at 94 among 107 countries. It was ranked 102 out of 117 countries in 2019. One year earlier, India was 103 among 119 countries. It is difficult to confirm if these statistics or rankings are based on empirical surveys. And, yet, this is widely recognized as an important indication of global hunger. China, Ukraine, Cuba, Kuwait, Brazil, Chile, Russian Federation, even Bosnia Herzegovnia, which were ravaged by war and genocide, are at the top in terms of successfully tackling hunger. Bangladesh, Myanmar and Pakistan have done much better than India.

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The Global Hunger Index is a categorical indictment of modernity’s alleged progress. It points out that so many human beings are hungry and malnourished — 690 million people. Globally, 144 million children suffer from stunting. At least 5.3 million children died before their fifth birthdays because of malnutrition.

Almost 40 per cent of children in India are stunted, a large number of them ‘wasting’ due to malnourishment. Almost 14 per cent are undernourished, says the report. Surely, the mid-day meal schemes in schools have played a role in reducing malnourishment and hunger, or MNREGA, during the UPA regime from 2004 onwards. However, the public distribution system (PDS) has been demolished, post liberalization – and it started under Manmohan Singh and the Congress regime. Economist Utsa Patnaik’s seminal study, ‘The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays’, is a testimony to this bitter realism. Surely, the current impasse of thousands of tonnes of food-grain holed up in the FCI godowns, is as much a ‘policy failure’, as was the Bengal famine under the British.

Several states in India have moved with positive measures. Kerala delivers food kits to poor households, post pandemic. In Bengal, before and after the cyclone, the government provided food across the spectrum during the pandemic. The civil society pitched in. The successful health and social security experiment in Dharavi, Mumbai, perhaps the largest slum in the world, is a paradigm shift in terms of efficiency and optimism.

Indeed, if anything, the deadly and deathly virus, should at least teach modern societies the importance of a healthy body and human being, who can withstand this killer disease. So how will the affluent society, the huge capitalist machine of excessive consumerism, and our mighty government, react to this hunger index?

Hopefully, with empathy, compassion, and a blueprint of effective praxis to end hunger once and for all.