Where is India headed ?

According to the Planning Commission, the body-mass index and height-by-weight ratio of Indians have remained unchanged over the last 25 years. This is a severe indictment of our policies on food production and food access. An India that ranks at the bottom of the world’s Hunger Index has not been able to better the lot of its poor in any significant way. Yet the number of dollar millionaires in the country has risen to over 153,000 and the fastest rate of growth of High Net Worth individuals is to be found in India. That means Indians are getting rich faster than any other people. Unfortunately, it is also the country where poverty and hunger is increasing alarmingly so that today India is home to the largest number of hungry people in the world.

How long will this situation last? How long will the hungry keep quiet? Not long by the looks of things. The rapid spread of armed violence, with or without ideological underpinnings, is threatening to rock the country’s boat. Several districts are ungovernable because the enraged masses who have been denied the basic needs have taken to the gun and routinely kill security forces who are sent to establish the authority of the state. In these parts, the state has no authority . Hunger and poverty have broken that authority into pieces and thrown the pieces away.

Fertile lands are being acquired by thugs in the name of industrial estates, allegedly for industrial growth but factories that would give employment cannot be spotted. As farmers abandon farming, the government looks on, finding ways to pamper the elite of this country even as farm families edge closer to the borders of survival. When there was story some years ago about hungry people in Odisha, eating mango kernels ( they are bitter, by the way), our sensitive lot argued that it was a culturally accepted food. People were not eating mango kernels because they had nothing else to eat , they said, but because they like to eat these kernels.

As rivers in Chhattisgarh are given to private companies and Coca Cola acquires priority access to the waters in Plachimada, the dispossessed fume and vow to take revenge for this neglect. The sounds of guns and grenades can be heard in the Hindi heartland where the silence of the plough tilling the land should be or the songs of women threshing the grain.

Where is India headed ?

According to the Planning Commission, the body-mass index and height-by-weight ratio of Indians have remained unchanged over the last 25 years. This is a severe indictment of our policies on food production and food access. An India that ranks at the bottom of the world’s Hunger Index has not been able to better the lot of its poor in any significant way. Yet the number of dollar millionaires in the country has risen to over 153,000 and the fastest rate of growth of High Net Worth individuals is to be found in India. That means Indians are getting rich faster than any other people. Unfortunately, it is also the country where poverty and hunger is increasing alarmingly so that today India is home to the largest number of hungry people in the world.

How long will this situation last? How long will the hungry keep quiet? Not long by the looks of things. The rapid spread of armed violence, with or without ideological underpinnings, is threatening to rock the country’s boat. Several districts are ungovernable because the enraged masses who have been denied the basic needs have taken to the gun and routinely kill security forces who are sent to establish the authority of the state. In these parts, the state has no authority . Hunger and poverty have broken that authority into pieces and thrown the pieces away.

Fertile lands are being acquired by thugs in the name of industrial estates, allegedly for industrial growth but factories that would give employment cannot be spotted. As farmers abandon farming, the government looks on, finding ways to pamper the elite of this country even as farm families edge closer to the borders of survival. When there was story some years ago about hungry people in Odisha, eating mango kernels ( they are bitter, by the way), our sensitive lot argued that it was a culturally accepted food. People were not eating mango kernels because they had nothing else to eat , they said, but because they like to eat these kernels.

As rivers in Chhattisgarh are given to private companies and Coca Cola acquires priority access to the waters in Plachimada, the dispossessed fume and vow to take revenge for this neglect. The sounds of guns and grenades can be heard in the Hindi heartland where the silence of the plough tilling the land should be or the songs of women threshing the grain.

Red Rice to Chinese Restaurants

The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London has a Center for Food Studies which invites a Distinguished Lecture every year. I had given the Distinguished Lecture in 2009 on ‘Challenges to Food Security’ . This year James L. Watson ,Emeritus Professor of Chinese Society and Anthropology, Harvard University, will deliver a lecture on an unusual and interesting subject: How the farmers in the fertile and productive Pearl river delta in China grew red rice in the mudflats and when the situation turned adverse for them, moved to Europe and Canada to dominate the business of Chinese restaurants. Watson’s talk, as the note from SOAS describes, will explain how in the chaotic aftermath of the Manchu conquests from 1644-1672, pioneers from central China settled on the fringe of the delta, near salt-water marshes that no one else wanted. Over the next two centuries they and their descendants reclaimed over a thousand acres of mudflats and built brackish-water enclosures that grew a special variety of red rice. The single crop was sold entirely to distilleries that produced medicinal wines and livestock feed. Unlike neighboring communities that had access to fresh-water and could take two crops a year of white rice, the Man community always lived a difficult life , dependent on their single crop from brackish water. Watson’s lecture will trace the social history of the Man community from the rice fields in the early 20th century, to the European restaurant trade in the 1950s and 1960s, to remarkable affluence and global enterprises in the 21st century. The heart of the story is red rice and the long-term consequences of life in a marginal ecosystem.

For nearly six hundred years, the Man survived by growing a specialized crop of red rice on brackish-water paddies along the Shenzhen River, a muddy creek that became the Anglo-Chinese border in 1898. This border was closed abruptly in 1949, following the Communist conquest of China . The Man farmers faced a crisis when their agricultural system collapsed during the early 1950s since the markets for their specialized rice were located on the Communist side of the river. Unlike other communities in other Territories that were based on fresh-water ecosystems, the Man could not convert to vegetables or white rice (which will not grow in saline fields). So they moved out to various places and successfully established and controlled the trade in Chinese restaurants !

LAUNCH A WAR ON HUNGER

India today boasts of 153,000 millionaires and 57 billionaires along with the largest number of hungry people in the world.

According to the FAO, India has made no progress in reducing hunger and malnutrition in the 15 years from 1992-2007. Yet in 2010 we saw the highest rate of growth of high-net worth individuals while we had 42 % of the world’s underweight children. Almost 70 out of every 1000 children in our country die before their fifth birthday, because they do not have enough to eat and no clean water to drink.

Nelson Mandela said about poverty, “Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity; it is an act of justice. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. He exhorted the youth of his country ‘YOU can be that great generation.” It’s the same with hunger.

Can we come together to fight this biggest enemy of our nation? Which holds back entire generations from reaping the benefits of independence and claiming their right as equal citizens of this country?

We wouldn’t want to be remembered as the generation that created unprecedented wealth but did not have the conscience to create an environment from which hunger was banished.

Can we come together to launch a war on hunger ? Can our generation be the one that changed the paradigm and started the effort to banish hunger? Can we be Mandela’s great generation?

Team Gene Campaign