The hunger around us

Context:  India is being crippled by the challenge of pervasive hunger and malnourishment.

Understanding Hunger

• Narrow view on hunger: James Vernon in his book Hunger: A Modern History, describes hunger as a “timeless and inescapable biological condition”.
• Broader perspective on hunger: Amartya Sen in his paper Hunger in the Contemporary World, 2008 enumerated the interdependence of food deprivation and hunger on multiple factors.
  • Hunger involves different interconnections of food or lack of it and well-being of economic sectors, women’s education, public activism and social commitment, employment, military expenditure, political incentives and government policies, people’s income and inter-family food distribution rules.

Issues of hunger in India: The complex diversity of interconnections of hunger is what makes India vulnerable to pervasive hunger

• Crisis of capitalism: Country’s food grain output was at a record 297.5 million tonnes in the crop year 2019-20, yet hunger is prevailing due to repressiveness in agri-market system.
• Poor performance in GHI:  The Global Hunger Index (GHI) report 2021 ranked India at 101 out of a total of 116 countries.
  • India fared worse than neighbours like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. These are countries with a similar subset of factors and “food interconnections” as of India.
• Advent of Covid-19: Lack of government interventions and policies post the pandemic period escalated the food insecurity crisis.
  • The study by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) on food security post Covid-19 crisis in Bangladesh concluded the country’s quick recovery to pre-pandemic levels with extensive government involvement. This was missing in India.
• Detrimental social indicators: India’s Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) is 28.7 per thousand live births and female literacy rate is 66%.
• Lack of political will and commitment: Our expenditure on health over the last five years has either remained static or declined.

Conclusion: United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, SDG 2.1 target enumerates that by 2030 we need to end hunger and ensure access of food for all people. India’s deterioration in GHI 2021 is a grim reminder of our potential inability to achieve SDG 2.1 target unless it does something drastically different.

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