How Big is the HUNGER Problem in India???

India is failing its rural poor with 230 million people being undernourished — the highest for any country in the world. Malnutrition accounts for nearly 50% of child deaths in India .According to the latest report on the state of food insecurity in rural India, more than 1.5 million children are at risk of becoming malnourished because of rising global food prices. The United Nations World Food Programme report points more than 27% of the world’s undernourished population lives in India while 43% of children (under 5 years) in the country are underweight. The figure is among the highest in the world. The proportion of stunted children (under-5) at 48% is again among the highest in the world. Every second child in the country is stunted, according to the health ministry’s figures.

Shocking isn’t it? But where does the cause lie?

The failure does not lie in any operational inability to produce more food, but a far reaching failure to make the poor of the country able to afford enough food. Firstly let’s talk about the food policy, and in particular food prices policy. Why is it the case that the large expenditure on food subsidy in India does not achieve more in reducing undernourishment? Part of the answer lies in the fact that the subsidy is mainly geared to keep food prices high for the sellers of food – farmers in general – rather than to make food prices low for the buyers of food. Secondly, the ambitious Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) is failing. Apart from failing to serve the intended goal of reduction of food subsidies, the TPDS also is leading to greater food insecurity for large sections of the poor and the near-poor. These targeting errors arise due to imperfect information, inexact measurement of household characteristics, corruption and inefficiency. Another problem, I feel, of the TPDS is the issue of quantity of grain that a household is entitled to. The TPDS initially restricted the allotments to BPL households to 10 kg per month. For a family of five, this amounted to 2 kg per capita. Using the ICMR recommended norm of 330 grams per day, the requirement per person per month would be 11 kg and that for a family of five would be 55 kg. Thirdly and most importantly the governments apathy. It is shameful that in a country where so many people go hungry it is left to the media and other agencies to highlight the pathetic state of affairs.

What, then, should we do, indeed what can we do? People have to go hungry if they do not have the means to buy enough food. Hunger is primarily a problem of general poverty, and thus overall economic growth and its distributional pattern cannot but be important in solving the hunger problem. It is particularly critical to pay attention to employment opportunities, other ways of acquiring economic means, and also food prices, which influence people’s ability to buy food, and thus affect the food entitlement they effectively enjoy. The public distribution system must be strengthened and it must be ensured that the food the government sets aside for BPL families is distributed to them through effective agencies. We must increase allocation through PDS, give food grain through the NREGA, offload the excess stock in the market, but not feed it to the rats.

Given our democratic system, nothing is as important as clear-headed public discussions of the causes of deprivation and the possibility of successful public intervention. Public action includes not only what is done for the public by the state, but also what is done by the public for itself. It includes what people can do by demanding remedial action and through making governments accountable. The lives and well-being of hundreds of millions of people will depend on the extent to which our public discussion can be broadened and be made more informed. I hope we manage to have some impact.


Underlying causes of hunger in India
· Falling per capita food production (especially in the last ten years).
· Increasing share of surplus states and large farmers in food production, resulting in export of artificial surplus reducing availability of food grains.
· Increasing inequality, with marginal increase in the per capita expenditure of the population’s economically poor. From their meager income, the poor are forced to spend more on medicines, education, transport, fuel, etc., which reduces the share of their expenditure on food.
· Poor access of the lower income population to expensive foods such as pulses, vegetables, oils, fruits, and meat products, which provide essential proteins, fats and micro nutrients.
· Low status of women in Indian society, their early marriage, low weight at pregnancy and illiteracy leading to low weight of new born babies.
· Poor children practices, such as not immediately cultivating the habit of regular breastfeeding after.

Some common features of poverty in India:
· Poverty is concentrated in the poorer states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand, which account for 27 per cent of the country’s population but 30 per cent of India’s poor lived there in 1973-74, which increased to 41 per cent by 2005.
· Three quarters of the poor live in rural areas and depend on agriculture.


There has been hardly any decline in poverty for the scheduled tribe households: almost half of them continue to be below the poverty line Although poverty amongst Scheduled Castes has declined from 46 to 37 per cent during 1993-2004 (Planning Commission 2008), the caste systems confines those from lower castes to a limited number of poorly paid, often socially stigmatized occupational niches from which there is no escape.
· Many states, in the northern and western parts of the country, are characterized by long standing and deeply entrenched social inequalities associated with gender.


Poverty is connected with vulnerability and shocks, compounded by general uncertainty with respect to livelihood and life. At the macro level, food grain availability in India is calculated as 87.5 per cent of the gross production (the rest is estimated as requirement for seeds, farm animal feed and waste) plus net imports, minus changes in government stocks. Assuming no net change in private stocks, this can be taken as a good proxy for overall food grain consumption in the country. During the last fifty years before independence, Food grain availability declined from 545 grams to 407 grams per head per day.


Hunger in India: 'The real cause is lack of political will'