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Silent suffering
India in the 21st century surges ahead, impatient to claim its long-sought status as an economic giant, with a burgeoning middle class. Confident and predatory, Indian business leaders stalk the world for new corporate acquisitions. According to Forbes, the combined wealth of India’s fifty-five wealthiest people was $ 246.5 billion in 2011. Between 1996 and 2008, wealth holdings of Indian billionaires are estimated to have risen from 0.8 per cent of GDP to 23 per cent. Yet it is an irony that India is also home to the largest number of impoverished people who sleep on an empty stomach in the world’s largest producer of milk and the second-largest wheat grower.
Often neglected by the government and dismissed by the middle class, 360 million poor people estimated by Planning Commission are around us in our films, literature, poetry and find a mention in election manifestos and budget speeches at regular intervals. Even now our attention is diverted when 24x7 electronic media invades the countryside with their intrusive cameras and accusatory interrogation to break exclusive stories of starvation deaths.
Harsh Mander, the author of Ash in the Belly, has fought a long battle to put an end to hunger – as a former bureaucrat in districts of central India, a member of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council and as a food security campaigner along with noted activists like Kavita Srivatsava, Jean Dreze, Colin Gonsalves and Biraj Patnaik, among many others.
Alternating between analyses and harrowing life-cycle tales of hunger narrated by destitutes from intensely food-insecure social groups in eight villages in Odisha, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh, Mander, in his book, attempts to uncover the political economy of hunger in India, its sociology and psychology and the achievements and failures of public policy in battling its occurrence.
The book moves the reader enough even before one embarks on the first chapter as the author’s note and prologue establishes how hunger, reality of millions of Indians, is insufficiently acknowledged except by those who are condemned to live with it.
Gajalachmi, 32, a widow from dalit Madiga caste of Andhra Pradesh in Medak district, died of hunger and caught in the vicious cycle of debt. In death, she had to be buried as she had lived without solace and dignity. “And without even a fistful of rice,” notes the author.
Though hunger is an unremitting way of life in India, Mander warns us not to reduce people living with hunger to statistical ammunition, subjecting their suffering and valiant resistance only to cold economics of costs and benefits, and calculus of calories.
A group of women of the Musahar community in Uttar Pradesh, Mander recalls in their conversation that the most terrible of lessons that each one has to teach her children is the lesson about how to sleep hungry. “If they are small, we sometimes beat them until they sleep. But as they grow older, we try to teach them how to live with hunger. This lesson will equip them for a lifetime. It will be their companion for the rest of their lives”.
Similarly Antamma in Andhra Pradesh, widowed early, only begged once for the leftovers from the government-funded school meal for children. Soon she was torn by guilt afterwards that she had eaten the children’s share.
One wonders how India could be on a trajectory of higher growth often highlighted by policy-makers when millions of children, women and men go to sleep hungry every night. Anyone complacent about the development that India has achieved should read this compelling and insightful book that reminds us that the right to food with dignity is indeed the right to life.
Though these tales may evoke sympathy, they equally reminds us that a much larger population who struggle daily to feed their families and themselves co-exist with readers and policy makers who gloat over shining India or high growth story.
“People living with hunger are not helpless – pitiable and passive receptacles of charity agents and state largesse – but are active agents with often sturdy spirit and humanity, who stoically endure want and oppression,” Mander writes, while passionately arguing for the passage of a universal right to food law which guarantees food to all persons not as State benevolence but as a legal entitlement.
India in the 21st century surges ahead, impatient to claim its long-sought status as an economic giant, with a burgeoning middle class. Confident and predatory, Indian business leaders stalk the world for new corporate acquisitions. According to Forbes, the combined wealth of India’s fifty-five wealthiest people was $ 246.5 billion in 2011. Between 1996 and 2008, wealth holdings of Indian billionaires are estimated to have risen from 0.8 per cent of GDP to 23 per cent. Yet it is an irony that India is also home to the largest number of impoverished people who sleep on an empty stomach in the world’s largest producer of milk and the second-largest wheat grower.
Often neglected by the government and dismissed by the middle class, 360 million poor people estimated by Planning Commission are around us in our films, literature, poetry and find a mention in election manifestos and budget speeches at regular intervals. Even now our attention is diverted when 24x7 electronic media invades the countryside with their intrusive cameras and accusatory interrogation to break exclusive stories of starvation deaths.
Harsh Mander, the author of Ash in the Belly, has fought a long battle to put an end to hunger – as a former bureaucrat in districts of central India, a member of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council and as a food security campaigner along with noted activists like Kavita Srivatsava, Jean Dreze, Colin Gonsalves and Biraj Patnaik, among many others.
Alternating between analyses and harrowing life-cycle tales of hunger narrated by destitutes from intensely food-insecure social groups in eight villages in Odisha, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh, Mander, in his book, attempts to uncover the political economy of hunger in India, its sociology and psychology and the achievements and failures of public policy in battling its occurrence.
The book moves the reader enough even before one embarks on the first chapter as the author’s note and prologue establishes how hunger, reality of millions of Indians, is insufficiently acknowledged except by those who are condemned to live with it.
Gajalachmi, 32, a widow from dalit Madiga caste of Andhra Pradesh in Medak district, died of hunger and caught in the vicious cycle of debt. In death, she had to be buried as she had lived without solace and dignity. “And without even a fistful of rice,” notes the author.
Though hunger is an unremitting way of life in India, Mander warns us not to reduce people living with hunger to statistical ammunition, subjecting their suffering and valiant resistance only to cold economics of costs and benefits, and calculus of calories.
A group of women of the Musahar community in Uttar Pradesh, Mander recalls in their conversation that the most terrible of lessons that each one has to teach her children is the lesson about how to sleep hungry. “If they are small, we sometimes beat them until they sleep. But as they grow older, we try to teach them how to live with hunger. This lesson will equip them for a lifetime. It will be their companion for the rest of their lives”.
Similarly Antamma in Andhra Pradesh, widowed early, only begged once for the leftovers from the government-funded school meal for children. Soon she was torn by guilt afterwards that she had eaten the children’s share.
One wonders how India could be on a trajectory of higher growth often highlighted by policy-makers when millions of children, women and men go to sleep hungry every night. Anyone complacent about the development that India has achieved should read this compelling and insightful book that reminds us that the right to food with dignity is indeed the right to life.
Though these tales may evoke sympathy, they equally reminds us that a much larger population who struggle daily to feed their families and themselves co-exist with readers and policy makers who gloat over shining India or high growth story.
“People living with hunger are not helpless – pitiable and passive receptacles of charity agents and state largesse – but are active agents with often sturdy spirit and humanity, who stoically endure want and oppression,” Mander writes, while passionately arguing for the passage of a universal right to food law which guarantees food to all persons not as State benevolence but as a legal entitlement.
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