[Nasional-e] Dying of hunger in a land of surplus

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International News / Dying of hunger in a land of surplus / Luke Harding in
Baran, Rajasthan


Dying of hunger in a land of surplus

Caste and corruption in India connive to keep food from those who most need
it : Sukan, a Sahariya woman, comforts her remaining child after two of her
children died of starvation. 'My baby died 16 days ago. I didn't have any
milk. But then, I didn't have anything to eat.' Photograph: Findlay
Kember/Polaris Images

Luke Harding in Baran, Rajasthan

When the crops failed and there was no work, the villagers of Mundiar began
searching for food in the jungle.
They didn't find any. Instead, they found grass. And so for most of the
summer, the village's 60 households got by eating sama - a fodder normally
given to cattle.
But humans are not supposed to eat grass, and soon the villagers, their
cheeks increasingly sunken, got weaker. They complained of constipation and
lethargy. Finally they started dying.
One villager, Murari, watched his entire family slowly succumb. First his
father, Ganpat, died, followed by his wife Bordi. Four days later, he lost
his daughter.
"My daughter was lying on the floor of my hut. Her body suddenly started
shaking. The shaking stopped. I tried to wake her up. But she was dead. I
buried her in the jungle," Murari, a 25-year-old labourer, whose mother died
next, said.
Across this remote part of north India - once covered in dense green forest
but now made barren by drought - it is the same story.
Over the past two months more than 40 members of the tribal Sahariya
community have starved to death. Their deaths could be explained if 21st
century India was more like southern Africa - a place prone to famine. But
it isn't.
Some 60m surplus tonnes of grain are currently sitting in government
warehouses. This is, by any standards, a large food mountain.
Campaigners point out that stacked
 on top of each other, the sacks of wheat would stretch to the moon.
Unfortunately none of them reached Mundiar or any of the other more remote
interior villages in southeastern Rajasthan.
In the village of Bhoyal, three hours' drive from Baran, the nearest big
town, across a shimmering landscape of eucalyptus trees and red-brown earth,
the evidence of chronic malnutrition is not hard to spot.
When we arrived, the Sahariyas were preparing a meal of cherata - wild
leaves boiled up with oil and salt. There was nothing else to eat. Their
children had swollen bellies. The adults were skeletal.
They were also fed up. "We went to the sarpanch [the village head] and asked
him for some grain. But he didn't give us any," one villager Prem, 45,
complained. He had been eating grass since July, he said.
Several children have died. "My baby died 16 days ago," one woman, Sukan,
25, said. "I didn't have any milk. But then, I didn't have anything to eat."
Officially nobody starves in India. Under a public distribution system,
villagers who sink below the poverty line are entitled to ration cards,
which allow them to buy subsidised grain from government shops.
But in Bhoyal, as elsewhere, the system has collapsed. The local sarpanch
handed out all the ration cards to cronies and members of his own caste, the
villagers said.
He also scratched out the names of widows entitled to government pensions.
The government shop-owners meanwhile refuse to sell the cheap
 grain to the untouchable Sahariyas. Instead, they get rid of it on the
black market. When the Sahariyas started dying, the shop-owners filled in
their ration cards in an attempt to try to conceal their scam.
Officials who are supposed to monitor the system rarely stir from their
offices. Millions of people are hungry in India not through lack of food but
because of massive official corruption, bureaucratic apathy and political
indifference.
It is a depressing paradox. Last month's starvation deaths are not the first
of their kind in India; dozens of tribal villagers died in the eastern state
of Orissa last year. But they have provoked a furious political reaction.
The authorities in Rajasthan have angrily denied that anybody has starved to
death and have accused Sankalp, the Indian non-governmental organisation
that raised the alarm,
 of spreading "false rumours". The victims merely succumbed to disease, the
state's Congress party administration has implausibly claimed.
But the reality is that few political leaders in India have shown much
interest in preventing hunger - especially among downtrodden lower-caste
communities like the Sahariyas.
"The government can't get away with large-scale famine, but it can get away
with chronic hunger," Jean Dreze, an academic and campaigner on food rights
said. "It has become an accepted part of life in India."
The deaths were perverse, he added. "I don't think in history there has been
so much food as there is in India today."
The levels of malnutrition in India - a country of more than 1 billion - are
among the highest in the world. About one half of all Indian children are
malnourished, while nearly 50%
 of Indian women suffer from anaemia. And yet most of the grain on India's
vast food mountain is either thrown away or eaten by rats.
It is those at the bottom of India's hierarchical caste system that suffer
most. The tribal communities, who account for 30% of Baran district's
population, are also the victims of historical injustice. Before
independence in 1947, the Sahariyas eked out a living by hunting and growing
a few crops.
After independence officials drove them out of the jungle and confiscated
their land. The Sahariyas were forced to seek jobs as agricultural
labourers. When the crops failed this summer, they had no work, and
therefore nothing to eat.
"Politicians are not interested in us," one woman, Nabbo, 50, said, as she
prepared her meal of chapattis made from sama - wild grass seed.

The Guardian Weekly 21-11-2002, page 3