Sitting on the side of the road, a five-year-old boy is waiting for the traffic signal to turn red. Wearing a tattered jacket, his ruffled hair flies as he runs barefoot towards the big cars as soon as the signal turns red. He initially knocks on their windows softly, and continues to knock when the people inside the car do not respond.
The boy does not spend more than a few seconds at each vehicle, and hops on to the next. The little boy, hardly covered against the cold, and visibly malnourished is one of the many children who beg as a way of livelihood in India’s national capital Delhi.
Hundreds of families sleep on the sidewalks as the temperature dips severely every day. However, there is no one to listen to their plight. When The Citizen tried to speak to them, they got upset and said people just interview them and then leave. “We have to resort to begging to get two meals a day,” a young woman said.
The little boy, meanwhile, goes to sit in the corner as soon as the lights turn green. Tired, hungry and thirsty, he takes whatever is offered to them by any car traveller. Most, just rudely shoo the child away.
At almost every nook and corner of Delhi, are people who still don’t have proper meals to sustain their nutritional needs. Besides begging, selling things such as car accessories, books, food items and balloons are what people have to resort to.
In shopping hubs like Connaught Place people can be seen trying to make ends meet by begging, or selling anything they can. They told The Citizen that life is difficult and they have no other choice.
Most of these people came from states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to find work only to be disappointed in the end. Delhi, known as the city of lights and friendships, has abandoned these people, who mostly belong to marginalised backgrounds. The hunger crisis is almost the same if not worse in almost any part of the country.
Going by the latest United Nations (UN) hunger scale report, out of the 1.4 billion people in India, over a billion could not afford a healthy diet in 2021.
The Right to Food Campaign, a non-government network campaigning for food security, said the FAO estimate that 1.043 billion people could not afford a healthy diet was in line with their own assessment that over a billion people need food aid, ‘The Telegraph’ reported.
The report also estimated India’s proportion of undernourished population at 16.6 per cent during 2020-2022.
The Indian government has its food aid schemes, the government has cited the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY), among its food aid schemes, that provides 5kg free food grain — rice or wheat — per family per month, covering 813 million people. Only, last month, the Union cabinet approved the scheme for five more years.
The Centre has said that against the intended coverage of 813 million people, the states and Union Territories have identified 804.8 million beneficiaries for the distribution of food grain under the PMGKAY.
“The 813 million estimate is based on the 2011 census — the next census is overdue by two years,” Raj Shekhar, national coordinator with the RFC, said. “Without the new census, many needy, vulnerable people won’t have the ration cards that will entitle them to the PMGKAY benefits.”
A study based on the National Family Health Survey 2021 found that among the poorest 20% households, more than 40% of women, even pregnant women, did not consume dairy products. It also found that over 50% of women and 40% of men in the country did not consume vitamin-A-rich fruits.
According to S.V. Subramanian, professor of population health and geography at Harvard University, who led the study, said the Union’s own count of 813 million people needing food aid was a “bit of a surprise” because “it seems larger than what is suggested by conventional measures of undernutrition,” the Telegraph reported.
For a comparison, about 66 percent of people in Bangladesh, 82 per cent in Pakistan, 30 per cent in Iran, 11 per cent in China, 2.6 per cent in Russia, 1.2 per cent in the US and 0.4 per cent in the UK were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2021, according to the report.
The report from the Food and Agricultural Organisation — a specialised agency of the UN — has raised questions on the police of the government.
The other countries ranking lower than India include Mozambique, Afghanistan, Haiti, Liberia, Chad, Niger, Lesotho, Yemen, Madagascar, and Somalia. Every other assessed country, besides these nations, had better outcomes than India.
Shekhar said the RFC had written several times to the government pleading for an expansion of the food assistance basket to include other items such as lentils (dal), cooking oil and vegetables, required for a healthy diet.
“Some states have introduced such items, but we’ve had no response from the Centre,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Centre, as per usual, has challenged the FAO report’s estimate of 16.6 per cent as the proportion of the undernourished in the country, saying the figure was based on a survey that had involved eight questions and a sample of 3,000 respondents.
“The data collected from a minuscule sample for a country of India’s size has been used to compute the proportion of undernourished (population in) India which is not only wrong and unethical, it also reeks of obvious bias,” the Centre has said.
The Union government had denied India’s low ranking on the Global Hunger Index earlier this year as well. It had called the exercise “an erroneous measure of hunger with serious methodological issues” that displayed “a malafide intent”.
On the contrary, in July this year, the government think-tank NITI Aayog released a report acknowledging a ‘remarkable achievement in India’s fight against multidimensional poverty’. According to the report, a staggering 13.5 crore people successfully emerged from multidimensional poverty between 2016 and 2021.
This progress was mirrored in a decline of 9.89 percentage points in the number of multidimensionally poor people, dropping from 24.85 per cent in 2015-16 to 14.96 per cent in 2019-21. The assessment was conducted using three equally weighted dimensions: health, education, and standard of living, keeping in line with the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI).
However, the same month, organisations including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Food Programme (WFP), and the World Health Organization (WHO) had jointly published a report titled “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World”.
This report shed light on a disconcerting nutritional trend in India, where a staggering 74.1 percent of the population cannot afford healthy food. This means that more than 100 crore people in India are compelled to consume food with insufficient nutrition. Comparatively, 10.9 percent of China’s population faces a similar predicament, reflecting a stark contrast.
Then in October, the Global Hunger Index (GHI) in a report showed India slipping to 107th rank out of 121.
The country's Ministry of Women and Child Development has said that the rankings are "flawed" and did not depict India's true position.
Union minister Smriti Irani had, on the other hand, confidently dismissed the data and had gone on to say that the “annual Global Hunger Index report is prepared by calling up people and asking them if they are hungry”.
She received heavy criticism from the Opposition for her comments who called her “ignorant” for her statement.
The Indian Government went on to say that, “There is hardly any evidence that the fourth indicator, namely, child mortality is an outcome of hunger.”
However, experts suggest that there is a lot of evidence to suggest hunger does lead to death in children in many ways.
“Malnourished children, particularly those with severe acute malnutrition, have a higher risk of death from common childhood illnesses such as diarrhoea, pneumonia and malaria. Nutrition-related factors contribute to about 45% of deaths in children under 5 years of age,” the World Health Organisation says.
The government also contested the childhood wasting figures of India. It said the government’s ‘poshan’ tracker said 7.3% of the children were ‘wasted’ as against GHI figures of 18.7 percent. An inter-agency UN exercise had estimated the prevalence of wasting at 18.7 percent – the source of GHI’s wasting rate for India. The government’s own National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5 data for 2019-21 had said the corresponding figure was 19.3 percent.
Despite claims of various food schemes, the situation shows a different reality. For many, not only have the schemes reached the masses, there is hardly any knowledge about it.
Many activists and non-profit organisations on ground have averred that there is hardly any proper implementation of such schemes. Speaking to The Citizen, Dr. Malini Saba, Founder and Chairman, Anannke Foundation said that there are families who still struggle to make ends meet and also aspire to dream of a better life.
“We meet families that are more than just statistics; they are people whose faces are marked with the hardship of making ends meet, frequently struggling to provide even a single meal a day. Undernourishment puts children’s potential at risk. During our research, we have seen mothers skip their own meals in order to give their kids access to food,” she explained.
Dr. Saba further said that the task goes beyond merely providing food and encompasses “repairing the fabric of dreams woven with threads of hope”. She, however, emphasised that given the struggle it is imperative that it is critical to address these issues through sustainable and community-driven initiatives.
One study that relied on the National Family Health Survey 2021 found that among the poorest 20 percent socio-economic households, more than 40 percent of women, even pregnant women, did not consume dairy products. It also found that over 50 percent of women and 40 percent of men in the country did not consume vitamin-A-rich fruits.
Dr. Saba, meanwhile, said that there could be various reasons why India has not been able to improve its Hunger Index. “Factors like resource distribution, where it is crucial to make sure that resources are distributed fairly, particularly to rural and marginalised populations, could be some of the reasons why the schemes are failing. There are also inequalities in the availability of high-quality healthcare, education, and work opportunities fuel the cycle of hunger and poverty,” she said.
Experts have also pointed out that despite good intentional policies, it is essential that they are carried out effectively in practice. “The success of food security and nutrition programmes depends on the identification and remediation of execution shortcomings,” Saba added.
In July, Indian agronomists and scholars had written how despite India’s increase in total food production, there has, unfortunately, been no translation in proportionate decreases in malnutrition.
“While over the last two or three decades, higher rates of economic growth, declining poverty and availability of staples have led to reductions in the number of undernourished to around 15 percent of the population, malnutrition remains stubbornly high; India ranked 103rd out of 119 countries on the International Food Policy Research Institute’s (IFPRI) 2018 Global Hunger (GHI) and is home to the largest number of malnourished people in the world, about one quarter of the global total,” they wrote.
The data has left many concerned, with many saying the government needs to start taking these data seriously.
“The data has a serious implication in a country, which claims to be the fastest economy. As people on the ground who provide food to the people, we see a whole different reality,” Fatima, a social worker based in Haryana said.
Nandlal Mishra, a doctoral fellow at International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, in an opinion piece in ‘Down to Earth’ wrote that India’s GHI score, over the past half a decade, has deteriorated primarily due to the increasing prevalence of calorie undernourishment and widespread child malnutrition.
As per the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the proportion of calorie undernourishment in India has been escalating since 2017, reaching 16.3 per cent in 2020, equivalent to the 2009 statistic.
“The Indian government has continuously disputed these conclusions by raising concerns about the data and methodology used in calculating GHI. However, the government has not been able to provide empirical evidence to support its claims,” he wrote.
He further explained that SHI exposes significant disparities in hunger severity across the country. “Bihar, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh exhibit the highest scores of 35, placing them in the ‘Alarming’ category (see ‘Nourishment disparity’). Following closely are Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Tripura and Maharashtra, all reporting scores above the national average of 29.7. The performance of these states resembles that of African nations like Haiti, Niger, Liberia and Sierra Leone,” he said.
In a recent statement, former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan has said that India needs to address problems like malnutrition to become a developed nation and also focus on its most important asset of human capital.
"We are fixated with becoming a developed, rich country by 2047. I use this as an example to say, you must be joking about becoming a developed rich country by 2047 with 35% malnutrition today," he said. The children who are suffering from malnutrition now would join the labour force 10 years from now, he said.
Dr. Saba meanwhile suggested that education and awareness about government aid programmes on affordable food options, and nutrition is essential.
“Education initiatives may address the knowledge gap that exists between a large number of people and the resources that are accessible to them,” she said.
However, Rekha who lives in a remote village of Rajasthan’s Udaipur is angry because the administration is failing to provide people with such details.
“Whose responsibility is it to make people aware about these schemes? In rural India, we are self sufficient but not every farmer has a lot of land or even owns land, these admins do not even know the situation of the family,” she told The Citizen.
For resolving such a major issue, Dr. Saba said that a thorough cooperative approach is required.
“To offer vulnerable populations a reliable support system, strengthen and expand social safety nets. This includes subsidies for necessary food items as well as focused aid programmes. The governments also need to make sure resources get to the people who need them most by assessing and enhancing the effectiveness of food distribution systems. This could entail using technology to provide information in an accountable and transparent manner,” she said.
She also said that there is also a need for government-NGO Collaboration. “Encourage improved communication and cooperation between non-governmental organisations and government agencies. We can create solutions that have a greater lasting impact by uniting our resources and expertise,” she said.
She added that in order to ensure that no one in our nation lacks access to wholesome food, it is imperative that society come together to tackle the underlying causes of inadequate nutrition.