Events
& Issues
New Delhi, 24 January 2012
Hunger & Affluence
INCREDIBLE INDIA, INDEED
By Proloy
Bagchi
The other day, a
national daily presented two contrasting pictures of India. On its front page was the
findings of a research indicating the extent of hunger and malnourishment in
the country and on the inside pages was a report on the explosion on its roads
with millions of private vehicles causing traffic jams in urban centres. One
wonders whether these divergent pictures in a single edition of a daily have
caught the attention of those who frame and implement the nation’s economic
policies.
If anything, these show the
growing economic inequality in India,
which can directly be attributed to the policies pursued since economic
liberalisation. There is no denying that the Government has taken some
initiatives to deal with the pervasive hunger and malnutrition but the measures
seem to have failed miserably to yield the desired results.
The daily cited the data
collected by researchers of Global Hunger Index (GHI), a multi-dimensional
statistical tool that was adopted and further developed by the International
Food Policy Research Institute, that reveal India has 213 million hungry and
malnourished people. Additionally, it reported that the Food & Agricultural
Organisation, a specialised agency of the United Nations, puts the figure at
230 million using, as it does, standard calorie intake formula for measuring
adequacy of food. Since the GHI’s hunger index is based on a broader formula,
its figures are marginally lower.
The shameful inescapable
fact, however, is that more than one-fifth of the country’s population suffers
from hunger. Worse, the country hosts the largest number of hungry people in
the world – about a quarter of the world’s 820 million. The dismal
statistics reveal that 21% of population is undernourished, nearly 45% of
under-five children underweight and 7% of them dying before they reach the age
of five. India is thus one
of the most hunger-ridden countries – worse than even Sudan, North Korea,
Nepal and Pakistan and better than only the Sub-Saharan
countries of Congo, Chad and Burundi.
The report also cites
the findings of the National Family and Health Survey carried out in 2004-05
according to which 23% of married men, 52% of married women and 72% of infants
were anemic. It further reports that “global research has now firmly
established that depriving the foetus of essential nutrients – as will happen
in an under-nourished pregnant woman – seals the fate of the baby once it is born”
making him susceptible to diseases, physical and mental retardation. So
continuing to allow people to go hungry and malnourished is not just misery for
them but also putting at stake the country’s future generations. It’s,
therefore, time the Government sat up, took notice and shook off its lassitude.
The second picture
presents a vastly different view – that of the other side of the country’s
economic spectrum. It displays the progressively increasing number of cars on
the roads of urban India
that result in almost daily traffic jams in not only metros but also in tier-II
and tier-III towns. With a car density of only 15 per 1000 (in 2006) the
situation on urban roads is bad enough. One wonders what will be the shape of
things if this density becomes 100 per thousand. The nation’s capital, Delhi, is reported to
have already reached that density and its citizens are paying for it by way of
huge, long drawn-out traffic snarls on a regular basis. Despite the rising
inconvenience of the commuting public, car makers are bullish about the Indian
car market. Its phenomenal growth shows hardly any signs of abating.
Acquisition of a car
today depends not so much on necessity as on the rising aspiration of India’s middle
class, so much so that everybody from a petty trader to an office personal
assistant acquires a four-wheeler. Perhaps, of greater interest is that, of
late the country’s biggest car manufacturer, Suzuki, has discontinued
manufacture of the basic entry model with which it launched its operations in India. It now
puts out models that are more sophisticated to cater to a discerning market
that has since become a place of ruthless competition.
Indeed, it is now a far
cry from the pre-liberalisation days when only three manufacturers monopolised
the market and the number of vehicles produced was in mere thousands. Today,
about two dozen manufacturers are jostling to grab a piece of the
ever-enlarging cake. During the last financial year as many as 2.5
million cars were sold and the market is so lively that even the European and
British luxury brands have set up shop here.
This apart, the growing
affluence of the middle class is reflected by massive spreads of ads in the
newspapers for high-end housing. Even prestigious foreign journals, such as The Economist and Time are used to entice NRIs and PIOs to buy what is on offer in India in the
shape of luxuriously appointed houses and apartments (some even with private
gardens) in gated complexes. In fact, gated complexes are proliferating all
over the country around urban centres, on farm lands and are snapped up by
businessmen, industrialists, politicians, foreign returnees and the corrupt,
chasing as they are, the Indian version of their “American Dream”.
The remarkable
co-existence of abject poverty and growing affluence of the middle and upper
classes made Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, wonder about India’s future.
Finding no clear roadmap for “where India is going today” he asked: “Does it
see itself evolving like the US where even the middle class has not been
sharing gains of the growth? Where the rich live in gated communities waited
upon by the vast majority of the poor who earn in a lifetime but a fraction of
what they receive in an hour?”
Various measures taken
by the Government for poverty alleviation, some of them in mission mode have
not yielded the expected results. This is amply testified by the statistics,
particularly in the areas of poverty, nutrition and education. The reasons
could be pervasive corruption and/or lack of governance. It is felt, while the
rural missions could continue with better inspection and monitoring, the Government
could, perhaps try, in addition, the world’s favourite new anti-poverty device,
the conditional cash transfer programmes (CCTP).
Under these programmes,
governments give stipend and food to the poorest if they meet certain
conditions, like sending children to schools or vaccinating the babies. These
programmes have spread far and wide as they cut poverty, improve income
distribution and help the next generation. Rules-based and generally uncorrupt,
CCTP has benefited a number of countries in Latin America and Africa
as it is good at providing what rural people lack: food, water, primary schools
and simple health care. And, yet the key element for its success, as in several
other missions, would be good governance. Time India gave it a thought. ---INFA
(Copyright,
India News and Feature Alliance)
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