Features & Articles

Starvation Amidst Plenty
Article written by Sachin Kumar Jain

It is once again the election season when promises are made and achievements are touted. In the face of the shining land are pockets of ugliness, which mar its complexion. The election promise of food for every stomach and employment for all will sound like a cruel joke to Daryav Singh, living in Khajoori village in Vidisha district near Bhopal. Without any means of survival, faced with hunger, he kept feeding his little 2-year-old daughter rotis made with wild sava grass. On the third day, unable to digest it, his dearest child died. It makes one wonder. Why is it that in a state like Madhya Pradesh, which claims that Panchayati Raj is thriving and decision making processes down to village level are characterized by informed and conscious choice that this bleak situation exists?

What is ironical is that there is a provision of surplus grain being kept with the sarpanch for disbursal to the needy. What happens to it and what are the lapses that happen which prevent this from reaching those who are weak, helpless and in dire need? If despite available resources and allocation of these to the needy, people are dying then there is something grossly wrong in the system.

There is a curious condition around the disbursal of the wheat, which debars those who benefit from pension or any welfare scheme. Combine this with the fact that a number of names of the old. Poor and helpless illiterates have been surreptitiously incorporated on paper in welfare schemes without their knowledge or consent. You have a lethal recipe for disaster like Daryav Singhs tragedy. No wonder that despite claims of copious reserves of surplus grain existing in every village one-third of all villagers go hungry to bed?

Is this a localized phenomenon or is it symptomatic of the larger policies impacting the lives of millions? The answer seems to lie in both. A closer study of the situation on the ground reveals that probably the grain never reaches the village in the first place. Those entrusted with the responsibility of distributing it did not dispense with it after all. Just in the last three months, seventeen instances where the Sarpanchs (whose primary duty is social welfare) were found selling the grain (siphoned off from government schemes meant to benefit the poor), on the open market. In this state the much-lauded pro-poor and progressive government policies fall flat on their face not because there are no resources, but because of an unholy alliance of those who profess public duty and infact sacrifice it for private gain.

Advisers to the government opine that the problem is tangled up with the economics of food and that the answers to the food crises lie in two things. Firstly, they try to explain the problem away by saying that despite being poor, the poor do not pick up rations from these shops, and so we do not stock more than we can dispose off. Secondly, the government usually picks up only about 60% of consumption as surplus stocks. The really astounding fact is that in all these years, not a single government has even attempted to find out the reason WHY people in the very throes of poverty are unable or unwilling to access these so called food stocks, meant especially for them? A close analysis of the situation reveals, some ludicrous examples of how the government is almost hell-bent on making the difficult access impossible instead of working towards it. For instance, the ration shop is 9 kilometers away from Nanipura village. Just going to-and-fro would cost Rs.4, defeating the whole purpose of low-priced rations!

Another instance of incredulous planning is that the timings of the shops coincide with the working hours of any poor labourer. Even if the shop remains open and is filled with stocks, it remains a mirage for those who need to toil to earn their daily bread. Such mindless planning and needless suffering is unfortunately the hallmark of an entire department of the Government impacting millions of lives, run without thought and without question. It makes one wonder that how can largesse lace with arsenic be deemed a situation of plenty?

The anguish of the hungry millions and those who speak for them have an election season before them to highlight their woes and expect sympathy and even redressal from those in power. Sadly, this is also tinged with the blame game that political parties excel at. At many such instances when accountability was demanded from the state government, it was pointed out that there was another party in power at the Centre and the election time gave ample scope for deliberately maligning the State Government. In the process, the poor once again is sacrificed at the altar of political maneuverings, conveniently pushing the real issues to the back burner. The poor, already pushed into poverty and hunger by the making and breaking of political alliances which it is powerless to stop or control, is expected further to grapple with the politics of the distribution system.

What is sad is that this combination of callousness, political compulsions throttles several government schemes like the Sampoorna Grahmin Rozgar Yojna (or the SGRY), which claims to grant the poor their basic right to employment. The Scheme provides priority access to both primary education as well as employment for the poor. That is in theory. In reality, at the village level it excludes the very same by reserving the benefits for those who are better off. It is they who benefit from these schemes and are given preference, while the really needy languish and grapple with their helpless and unchanging situation.



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