Hunger Pangs: India’s global image at all time low

 

Hunger  Pangs: India’s global image at all time low

It is very depressing that India continues to slide in development indices. The poor getting poorer and the rich growing richer, despite the constitution proclaiming India a socialist welfare state to ensure that means of production and distribution are not concentrated in the hands of few to the detriment of common good.

 

The top 10 per cent Indians earned 56 per cent of the country's total income in 2019; with the bottom 10 per cent earning just 3.5 per cent; and the richest 10 per cent owning a staggering 81 per cent of wealth.  It is estimated that 77 percent of the total national wealth is held by the top ten percent of the population. The richest person in Asia is Indian businessman Mukesh Ambani, with a net worth of 6.5 trillion dollars in 2019.

 

The largest democracy in the world, after all, is not a ‘full democracy.’ India slipped to 53rd position in the 2020 Democracy Index’s global ranking, according to The Economist Intelligence Unit, due to ‘democratic backsliding’ by authorities and ‘crackdowns’ on civil liberties. Out of 167 countries, the Democracy Index classifies 23 countries as full democracies, 52 as flawed democracies, 35 as hybrid regimes, and 57 as authoritarian regimes. India has been classified as a ‘flawed democracy’.  What we see today in India is electoral autocracy.

 

Of late, India’s rankings in different indices of the world are: 86^th in corruption;111^th in human freedom;116^th in human capital investment;121^st in economic freedom;131st in Human development;135th in Global Peace;142^nd in world press freedom; and 147th in inequality. And now comes a shocking revelation that as per the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2021, India has slipped to the 101st position among 116 countries, falling far behind its immediate neighbours- Pakistan (92), Nepal and   Bangladesh (76), Sri Lanka (65) and even Myanmar (71), which is ruled by a military junta.  India’s GHI score has decelerated from 39 in 2000 to 27.5 in 2021. The GHI score is calculated on four indicators:

 

Undernourishment: Share of the population with insufficient calorie intake;

Child Wasting: Share of children under age five who have low weight for their height, reflecting acute undernutrition;

Child Stunting: Share of children under age five who have low height for age reflecting chronic undernutrition; and

Child Mortality: The mortality rate of children under age five.

 

It is obvious the  welfare schemes meant to benefit the poor and the weaker sections are not reaching them. Then who are the beneficiaries? The various poverty alleviation programmes of the government have not contributed to raising the standard of living of the poor and marginalised.

It is interesting to know that India's per capita GDP has slipped badly compared to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. India's per capita GDP stands at 1,947 USD as against 3,682 and 1,969 of Sri Lanka and Bangladesh respectively. Just a decade ago, Sri Lanka was a war-torn country. And Bangladesh emerged from a painful separation from Pakistan, hugely dependent on doles from India and elsewhere. But its policy makers have managed their affairs better than what India has done. That explains why the people in these neighboring countries  are better off in terms of purchasing power.

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2021 emphasizes that undernourishment is on the rise. The Global Report on Food Crises points to the growing magnitude and severity of food crises in 2020 and the grim outlook for 2021. The World Food Programme warns that 41 million people are “teetering on the very edge of famine.” It points to a dire hunger situation, a result of the toxic cocktail of the climate crisis, and increasingly severe and protracted violent conflicts. Against the backdrop of the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit, this year’s GHI report delves into one of the biggest policy challenges: how to deliver meaningful change for the 155 million people considered acutely food insecure. Heightened food insecurity leads to violent conflicts. And without resolving food insecurity, it is difficult to build sustainable peace. The authors of the Report- Mathias Mogge Secretary General Welthungerhilfe and Dominic McSorley Chief Executive Officer Concern Worldwide- argue “for the integration of a peace-building lens into the creation of resilient food systems and a food and nutrition security lens into peace building.”

 

The India’s National Food Security Act ,2013 (known as the 'Right to Food Act') aims to provide subsidized food grains to two thirds of the population ((75% in rural areas and 50% in urban areas). The Right to Food Act converts into legal entitlements for existing food security programmes of the Union Government. It includes the Midday Meal, the Integrated Child Development and the Public Distribution System. The government claims that more than 80 crore Indian people are benefiting by the subsidized ration. But the poor are harassed on one pretext or the other and the ration doesn’t reach the poorest of the poor, who need it the most. The welfare schemes are mired in deep corruption, with the nexus between the authorities and the middlemen, who misappropriate the subsidized food grains. Corruption is the biggest evil of the Indian state.  

 

The study Report of 2021 titled, 'State of Working India 2021’ by Azim Premji University has touched upon several aspects pertaining to the state of the Indian economy.  At a time when the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is ravaging India, a report prepared by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University has highlighted how employment and income had not recovered to pre-pandemic levels and the latest surge in cases would only add to the devastation and distress.

 

The Report highlights how women lost more employment than men during the pandemic last year, how nearly half of formal salaried workers moved into informal work and how poorer households experienced far higher losses in income during the lockdown period. It reveals that 230 million additional individuals fell below the national minimum wage poverty line due to income shocks in 2020. The UN estimated the number of poor in the country to be 364 million in 2019 or 28 per cent of the population and add the present figure of the people reduced to poverty to gauge the untold misery of the poor and the weak. To counter the loss of income, the Report notes how “the poorest households took the largest loans relative to their earnings” and cautions that since many of these loans were taken from private money lenders at high interest rates, they have the financial status of borrowers at peril.

The Report brought to the fore the “unprecedented hardships for Indian households” faced during the pandemic. It looks into the “severe supply and demand shock” that stemmed from the economic slowdown, which had been existing even before the pandemic, and how this, in turn, led to losses in employment and earnings, increase in food insecurity, and rise in poverty and inequality. And with little or no social protection available and the safety net mostly rooted in domicile, the poorest are hit the hardest. These included the self-employed and casual workers, who constitute 45% of total urban employment. 

The Indian state has failed to lift the poor and the marginalised above the abject poverty. It is a travesty of justice- social and economic. And with the fuel prices skyracketing and vegetable prices beyond the common man's reach', the hunger pangs of the poor have only increased their misery. They are reduced to destitutes. India’s global image is at all-time low.

It is ironical that India in spite of being a food-surplus nation-its food grain production having increased during the past two decades from 198 million tonnes to 269 million tonnes-some190 million people go to bed on an empty stomach every day, due to variety of factors such as grinding poverty, deepening unemployment, agrarian stress and leakages and massive corruption in the mammoth public distribution system. The growing levels of food insecurity have pernicious long term effect on health outcomes of children, with mothers who are undernourished giving birth to stunted and underweight children, affecting their entire lifespan.