Continuing hunger

It should be a matter of the utmost concern that India has done so poorly on the removal of hunger in the near-decade to 2003. The latest numbers put out by the International Food Policy Research Institute, using data taken from leading United Nations agencies, say that the Global Hunger Index gives India a score of 25.73 in 2000-03, virtually unchanged from what the index reported for 1995-97. The critics of India's record during the reform years, after 1991, would appear to have a point that the poor have not benefited from the changes in economic policy. The index is constructed by using three key sets of numbers. Thus, the proportion of undernourished people in the total population remained stable at 21 per cent from 1995 till 2003, the last year included in the survey. The prevalence of underweight children under five years of age even increased, from 45.4 per cent in 1995-97 to 47.5. The only score on which there is improvement is mortality for children under the age of five, declining from 108 in 1995-97 to 87 in 2000-01.

A static hunger index runs counter to the poverty numbers, which have shown a steady if somewhat slow decline during the same period. It would ordinarily stand to reason that if people are getting a higher calorific intake (which is the basis of the poverty numbers), then hunger levels too should be coming down. Sample surveys asking people whether they have had two square meals a day also suggest a very much lower level of hunger. However, even if the numbers are not mutually consistent, it is more productive to focus on the shortcomings in policy that continue to allow unquestionably high levels of poverty and hunger, even as there is rapid economic growth.

At one level, this is a severe indictment of the efficacy of the many government programmes aimed at addressing the needs of the poor. For instance, the Narasimha Rao government focused specifically on those below the poverty line by giving them special entitlements like an extra subsidy on food supplied through the public distribution system, but this does not seem to have made any difference (probably because, as other studies have shown, the PDS system has poor coverage in the poorest areas of the country). The spread of the mid-day meal scheme in schools has also been increasing, and this should ordinarily have helped to improve child nutrition; that, however, does not seem to be the end result. Since the numbers stop at 2003, none of the UPA government's programmes for the aam aadmi is under scrutiny, so the numbers have no bearing on current policy debates. But it is worth noting that the latest family health survey findings show little or no progress in key areas like the reach and effectiveness of the immunisation programme. Clearly, the core problem that many commentators have repeatedly drawn attention to "" namely, the effectiveness of service delivery by the government "" is what needs over-riding attention. One could throw more money at the problem, but that would be of little use if the delivery system is dysfunctional. It should be a matter of national shame that 40 per cent of the world's malnourished children are Indians. In that sense, India remains the byword for poverty and hunger.