What's the fastest growing sector in today's India? IT? Mobile telephony? Infrastructure? Automobiles? IPL? Guess again: it's hunger. Sixty-plus years after independence, an India which boasts being the second fastest growing economy in the world has a large and growing population which by some estimates is much bigger than the total population of the US condemned to chronic starvation and malnutrition.
In a recent ruling the Supreme Court has said that each Indian family below the official poverty line (BPL) must be given 35 kg of subsidised foodgrain, at Rs 2 a kg. Meanwhile, the draft Food Security Act, championed by Sonia Gandhi and which is to come up for debate in Parliament, seeks to guarantee 25 kg of subsidised grain to households belonging to the BPL category.
But who exactly comprises that stratum and how many people are included in it? Statistics confuse, as statistics always do. There are 300 million Indian citizens our fellow citizens, who have the right to vote, if they are of age, but not the right to eat belonging to households subsisting on the World Bank poverty benchmark of less than one US dollar a day, or about Rs 45 at current exchange rates. A report prepared by the PMO's Economic Advisory Council puts the number of poor at 370 million. Basing their figures on household incomes, state governments claim that countrywide there are 420 million people existing below the poverty line. If you raise the poverty line to two US dollars a day per household, or a little over Rs 90, the poverty figure reaches 800 million, or some 80 per cent of our total population.
The central government has so far pledged Rs 1.18 lakh crore for 2010-11 to combat entrenched hunger. If Sonia Gandhi's determination to raise the subsidised grain to 35 kg is taken into account, an additional Rs 82,100 crore will be added to the bill.
More than even war or natural calamity, whose savagery at least has the mercy of being swift, deep-seated hunger, with no hope of relief, poses the biggest challenge not just to our social and economic structures but to our definition of humanity, of what it means to be human. Hunger has been known to force parents to sell their children for food. Does such an 'unnatural' act, which goes against the biological instinct to protect one's children, de-humanise such people, make them less than human? Should the term BPL be changed to BHL, below the human line?
That is hunger's final twist of the knife in an agonisingly empty belly: the knife of guilt. Unlike victims of war or a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or a tsunami, the victims of hunger are made to feel guilty for their condition, as if it is their own culpable lack of effort or enterprise or sheer survival skill that has brought them to this living death; the skeleton pushing through the skin, the eyes sunk into the blind sockets of the skull.
With whom ought to lie the guilt of their hunger? A hunger obscenely echoed by a fast-food slogan that's become part of urban India's idiom: Hungry, kya?
Hunger and voracity have always coexisted, in all societies. But seldom has the juxtaposing of the two been so stark as in today's India, where reports of children's starvation deaths feature next to advertisements for slimming clinics, liposuction procedures, boutique gyms that promise to turn flab into sinew chic.
Together with the world's largest percentage of starving people, India also has the highest percentage of diabetics, coronary patients and others suffering from diseases and ailments directly caused by over-consumption. A macabre revenge for the hunger that haunts the other India?
Food for thought. Or rather, the cruel lack of it for thought.
