Hunger games

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, October 26, 2014

The Hindu Hunger, malnutrition, under-nutrition… are not the talking points at election rallies or television debates .

In this season of festivities, when urban lifestyle-based diseases are getting a boost as we stuff our stomachs with forbidden foods, and our homes eat up even more of scarce electricity, one in every third child will go to bed hungry. Her home will be dark, without even the light from the hearth that cannot be lit because there is no cooking fuel.

Hunger, malnutrition, under-nutrition… these are not the talking points at election rallies or television debates but they remain a hard and unrelenting reality for million of Indians. I fear that — in the drummed-up euphoria surrounding cleaning up India, making in India and other such slogans — this depressing reality will be obscured and forgotten.

The good news, we are told, is that acute hunger is decreasing. On the Global Hunger Index 2014, prepared by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), India now ranks 55th of the 76 countries and its situation has moved from ‘alarming’ to ‘serious’. That is good.  But is it something to celebrate? That from 45.1 per cent of underweight children under five years of age in 2005-06, there are now 30.7 per cent of underweight children as of last year? It is progress, but that still leaves virtually one in every three children under five years of age that is underweight. This means this child will never be able to catch up as an adult because she has been deprived of adequate and nutritious food in the first five years of her life.

We should also be worried that the very programmes that helped this decline are now in danger of being neglected, or reformulated in a way that could prove detrimental. For instance, IFPRI acknowledges that government programmes that have contributed to this decline in child hunger are the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) under which balwadis in villages provide young children with a nutritious supplement; the committee to monitor malnutrition set up by the Supreme Court; the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) that has increased access to health care for many in rural areas; the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which has guaranteed employment to millions of people; and the Public Distribution System (PDS), which provides subsidised food grains to people below the poverty line.

Apart from hunger caused by inadequate quantity of food, millions also suffer from hidden hunger, due to the deficiency of micronutrients in the food. If you are poor, not only do you get little to eat, but what you eat is also of poor quality. This is what aggravates the already deadly impact of undernutrition. Whenever these subjects come up for discussion — and internationally and in India they do so all the time — there are many technical fixes that are discussed such as bio-fortification, which involves increasing the micronutrient content of food crops.  In other words, the same grain that you eat will be fortified so that even if you eat the same quantity, you will get more nutrients into your system.

While all that is well-meant, if you are poor, you need money to buy food, even if it is subsidised. And you need work to earn the money to buy that food. Despite its shortcomings, MGNREGA has been responsible for putting that money in the hands of millions of rural poor. Yet, this programme is being deprived of funds and could end up a mere acronym.

The technical fixes also misfire because the approach is sometimes top-down without taking in the particular needs of different parts of India. For instance, one of the solutions for malnutrition among children is to give them a high-energy protein paste, that includes crushed peanuts, through the ICDS programme. But the solution, although it makes sense, does not take into account the fact that children’s tastes and eating habits differ in various parts of India. Or that severely malnourished children — like those in isolated tribal hamlets in some parts of Maharashtra, for instance — cannot digest this rich mixture because they are so emaciated. Rather than giving them nourishment, the mixture can cause acute diarrhoea. So, universalised solutions do not work if there is no flexibility built into such programmes.

Just as a handful of long-handled brooms will not clean India, there is no magic wand for ending hunger. The real measure of a country’s progress should surely be the child hunger index. And here India continues to fall short. Moving from ‘alarming’ to ‘serious’ is simply not good enough.

(To read the original, click here.)

Out in the open

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, October 12, 2014

Absence of sanitation facilities for women during disasters enhances their vulnerability. Photo: AP

The absence of sanitation facilities for women during disasters enhances their vulnerability.

Last month, while our attention was diverted by what our politicians were doing on foreign shores and at home, tragedies on a massive scale were being played out in many parts of the country.

Besides the devastating floods in Kashmir last month, vast swathes of the rest of India have also been inundated by floodwaters. Odisha, Bihar, Assam and Meghalaya have seen some of the worst flooding in years. For these states, floods are an annual phenomenon. But this year they have been worse and in places where the waters never advanced with such force in earlier years.

So even as the usual tamashas and tirades occupy our news space, spare a thought for the women, men and children in these states who are still struggling. Even as I write this column, an estimated four lakh people in Assam and Meghalaya, spread over 4,446 villages in 23 districts are homeless or badly affected by the floods. Thousands of people remain in relief camps because they cannot go back to their villages.

In Odisha last month, rising river waters submerged thousands of villages in 23 of the 30 districts in the state. In Bihar, too, the flooding has been relentless, spreading destruction, destitution and disease.

While the reports in the media on these states are few and far in-between — you have to make a determined effort to mine out the news from mainstream Indian media — the few reports that have appeared make heart-rending reading.

One report that I found particularly touching appeared in The Hindu on August 27, 2014, under the headline, ‘Women fight shame in flood hit Bihar’ (http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/women-fight-shame-in-flood-hit-bihar/article6356043.ece?homepage=true). It quoted women in Bihar’s Supaul district talking about the particular challenge that they face as women in the wake of floods.

A woman in her thirties was quoted saying, “Poor women like us face more problems to relieve ourselves when floods force us to flee our villages. It is our fate. No one can imagine this except those like us.”

Another older woman said, “We have no option but to relieve ourselves in the open by closing our eyes and minds to the hell-like situation.”

What they are talking about is the pathetic absence of any sanitation arrangement for women during such disasters. You might argue that in any case many of these women would not have toilets and are therefore used to open defecation. But can anyone imagine what this woman means when she says they close their “eyes and minds” when they go out to relieve themselves in a flooded landscape?

Why, people would legitimately ask, should we make such a fuss about women’s problems at such times when everyone — men, women and children, as well as the elderly — are affected? I do so because in many ways women’s vulnerabilities are enhanced at such times. If they confront a daily challenge of sanitation, this is compounded during floods and other disasters. Yet, when relief measures are put in place, the particular needs of women are often overlooked.

In a powerful article that Assam-based journalist Teresa Rehman wrote after the 2010 floods in her state (infochangeindia.org/environment/features/sanitation-in-the-time-of-floods.html), she quotes a woman called Salma Begum from Sonitpur district: “Sometimes we have to seek permission from the owners of a dry patch in order to defecate. Most often we have to do it discreetly, on other people’s land, as it becomes difficult to control oneself. Sometimes, during the floods, we starve ourselves so that we do not need to defecate.”

In this instance, women like Salma were beneficiaries of the government’s Total Sanitation Programme, in particular low-cost toilets. Yet, one flood, and everything including these toilets are washed away. Women like her are then left with no alternative but to revert to the age-old practice of open defecation, with the added complication of not finding a dry spot.

Floodwaters are indiscriminating. They sweep away everything and everyone that comes in their way. But for the survivors, the story varies greatly depending on class, caste and gender. And this is where the voices of women like Salma from Assam or the women from Bihar must be heeded. The process of relief and rehabilitation must necessarily be ‘gendered. The absence of toilets is a woman’s problem in a very specific way.

Sweeping our streets clean is all very well but surely cleanliness must mean that women do not need to live through ‘a hell-like situation’ on a daily basis.

(To read the original, click here.)