If I brief my own village area which comes under the Athagarh Assembly constituency in Odisha, 20 km from Cuttack town and 35 km from State capital Bhubaneswar situated on the bank of Mahanadi, it’s highly affected by Covid-19 and two to three families are skipping one meal every day in each village due to financial crisis. Earlier, all the people were depending on farming only. All the farmers depend on the rain and minor irrigation water. So, they were cultivating paddy once and green gram or black gram once leaving few lands for vegetables. Somewhat all was well previously. One decade back two factories came there. One is Arati Steel and other is RawMat, now taken over by the Tatas.
Most of the local labourers get employed in the factories and there was no labour available in the area for field farming hard work with mud.
So, most of the farmers stopped farming due to non-availability of local labourer or their unaffordable cost in last four five years. Now, they depend on factories for their livelihoods very badly which stopped all of a sudden due to Covid-19.
Though the Government has tried to help them out still it’s not adequate to manage hunger. Against this backdrop, it is pertinent to understand the reasons behind India’s poor performance in the Index and the recent steps by the Government to address the underlying issues.Poverty is the major reason behind the alarming levels of hunger. Poverty restricts the food choices and has been the causative factor of hunger related deaths.
As per the statistics released by the World Bank, around 12 percent of the county’s population was below the poverty line in 2011-12. The calculation was done on the basis of the Mixed Modified Mixed Reference Period (MMRP) concept proposed by the multilateral agency in 2015.
If the persistent high prices of food items and the regional disparities in terms of development, especially the backwardness among the hilly and tribal areas also taken into account, the percentage of people who cannot afford balanced nutrition will be much higher in India.Hunger and the related under nutrition is the result of various associated factors ranging from water, sanitation, access to food items. A person’s ‘nutritional quotient’ is also dependent on demographic factors like gender, caste, age, etc. For instance, the nutritional needs of girl child’s and elderly are not adequately addressed in our society.
Another important reason behind the persistent hunger is the poor implementation of the schemes and policies. As mentioned by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which releases the annual Hunger Index, the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) and the National Health Mission (NHM) have not achieved the adequate coverage.
As per some policy experts, India’s poor show in the 2017 Global Hunger Index (GHI) ranking doesn’t truly reflect the scenario on the ground for two reasons -because of the methodology adopted and the data used to calculate India’s global ranking. The 2017 GHI was calculated as a weighted average of four standardized indicators - percentage of the population that is undernourished, percentage of children under five years who suffer from wasting, the percentage of children under five who suffer from stunting, and child mortality.
As a result, the ranking assigned 70.5 percent weightage to children below five years, who constitute only a minor population share and 29.5 percent weightage to the population above five, who constitute 81.5 percent of the total population.
In effect, India’s ranking was badly reflected. Another key argument put forward by the critics is that India’s ranking has relied on data of 2012-13, while the ranking of other countries took into account the recent data.
It has also been mentioned that had these two ‘anomalies’ were corrected, India’s performance would have been much better in the 2017 GHI. However, the accuracy in rank may be debated but we can’t deny the fact of existence of more Nagadas in India and Odisha as well.In early 2017, the NITI Aayog unveiled the National Nutrition Strategy to bring nutrition into the national development agenda and to deal with the problem of hunger and nutrition in a comprehensive manner.
Further, the strategy seeks to achieve Kuposhan Mukt Bharat (India free from malnutrition) by 2022. Is it possible within next remaining two years! Can we predict that there will be no more Nagada in Odisha! To realize the objectives set forth by the strategy, the Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on November 30, 2017 approved the setting up of the National Nutrition Mission (NNM) with a three year budget of Rs 9,046.17 crore starting from 2017-18.
The mission is rolled out in three phases from 2017-18 to 2019-20. Its focus is on reducing stunting, under-nutrition, anaemia among young children, women and adolescent girls and reduces low birth weight. The NNM is expected to benefit more 10 crore people covering all the States and districts in a phased manner - 315 districts in 2017-18, 235 districts in 2018-19 and the remaining districts in 2019-20. Now we are just approaching our end of schedule period.
So, we need to check all these in Nagada as well as all backward KBK areas to know whether we have achieved our goal or not!
The National Food Security Act became functional in September 2013 to provide for food and nutritional security. This was the first step by the Government to make nutrition a legal right.
Despite its noble objectives, the effectiveness of the Act has been limited as it only ensures “affordable access” to “eligible households” and doesn’t have the universal appeal.
It is high time, the policy makers should consider providing for the ‘right to be free from hunger’ as a fundamental right as envisioned by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which was ratified by India as early as 1979.
Though we say most of our villages are doing well in sanitization with 100 percent usage of latrine, our schemes of one rupee kilo rice is taking care of hunger very well but still we are lying to ourselves only.
As per Niti Aayog SDG India Index Baseline report, while Bihar tops the list of 14 bigger States with 33.74 per cent population below poverty line, it is 32.59 per cent in Odisha as against the national average of 21.92 per cent.
Leaders need to visit interior Odisha, not as a VVIP but as a common man with lot of free time in their hand if they want to know real situation in ground zero and explore the possibilities to save them from the hunger.
(Engineer Panda lives in Bhubaneswar. Mob: 9439128050. bdpanda1@gmail.com)