By Harsh Mander
Harsh Mander is a writer and social activist, and founder and Director of the Centre for Equity Studies (CES), New Delhi. He was the former Special Commissioner to the Supreme Court, in the Right to Food case. Email: manderharsh@gmail.com
India’s global rankings made the headlines at least twice in 2016, and both times the news was dampening. The first report revealed that India’s place in the Global Hunger Index compiled by IFPRI fell from 83 in 2000 to 97 in 2016 (Business Standard, 2016), with India scoring even worse than its much poorer neighbours Bangladesh and Nepal. The second disclosed that India’s rank in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Report rose by only one position, from 131 the previous year to 130 (The Hindu, 2016), among 190 countries.
The tardy improvement in India’s Ease of Doing Business global rating led to immediate official statements of concern in the corridors of power. Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said she was ‘disappointed’, and Prime Minister Modi directed secretaries of the union government and chief secretaries of state governments to analyse expeditiously the reasons for sluggish progress, and identify areas for improvement both in central government departments and the states.
India’s dismal performance in fighting hunger, however, attracted no similar comment or the articulation of concern at senior levels of the union government. The volubility of the government on one and the silence on the other is in itself an eloquent commentary on the priorities of the government, a reflection of who it feels primarily responsible to.
What does a low ranking in the Global Hunger Index (GHI) indicate? It means first that too high a proportion of India’s people (around 15 per cent) are under-nourished (The Times of India, 2016). It means that too many children under the age of five (15 per cent) are wasting, reflected in low weights for their heights. And too many are stunted (a shameful 39 per cent), meaning that their bodies are adjusting to chronic low nutrition by becoming shorter for their ages. And finally, it means that too many children (4.8 per cent) die before reaching the age of five years, because of the fatal cocktail of too little nutritious food and highly unhealthy environments. It is important to remember that what for the scholar is ‘under-nutrition’ is for people who live with this condition the anguish of being unable to feed oneself or one’s loved ones, of reduced physical and mental capacities, and of succumbing to infections or circumstances that they would have been able to fight if they were well-nourished.
Stunting and wasting means that the bodies and minds of millions of our children are being starved into feebleness. Under-five mortality means the agony of millions of mothers and fathers who are helpless as they lose their children only because of their dirt-poverty.
Compared to other countries, India’s government is simply doing too little to prevent this enormous and entirely preventable suffering of millions of impoverished citizens. And the silence of the government about these continued failings can only mean that it is not stirred or shamed by this report card, that there is still little urgency to alter the destinies of India’s poorest majorities—rural, slum-based, informal workers, women, tribal, Dalit, minority, disabled groups, aged people, single women, and above all children from all these groups. It is not as though there has been no improvement in India in each of these parameters in recent years. In 2013, India’s position was rated as ‘alarming’; today it is slightly better at ‘serious’. In 2016, India’s GHI score was 28.5, an improvement over 36 in 2008. Since 2000, India has reduced its GHI score by a quarter. But 20 countries, including much poorer countries like Rwanda, Cambodia, and Myanmar, have all reduced their GHI scores by over 50 per cent since 2000.
So, the problem is not that India is doing nothing to end hunger. But its improvements are much slower than even countries which are often much poorer, not self-sufficient in food production, without functional democracies, and sometimes strife-torn. India’s GHI score places it fifth from the bottom in Asia: only Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, Pakistan, and North Korea trail behind India. This surely is not illustrious company for an India that prides itself as the world’s fastest growing economy. The report estimates that if India continues to reduce hunger at the same pace, it will still be in the ‘moderate’ to ‘serious’ hunger zone in 2030.
India’s failures to reduce and end hunger, poor health and early deaths, resulting in immense suffering of millions of its people, is even more unconscionable because all of this is preventable. India has the food production, the levels of growth, the economic resources and the state capacities that it requires if it resolves to make hunger history. Countries which have overtaken India often lack many of these advantages. India’s failures are not inevitable. They are the direct result of its public policy priorities and choices: its market fundamentalism and its refusal to invest adequately in the nutrition, education, social protection and health of its people.
India’s continued trouncing in its battle against hunger stems first from its very low investments in agriculture, as a result of which India’s food producers constitute its largest ranks of the hungry and malnourished. For a sector that gives work to around 55 per cent of the population, the government invests less than 4 per cent of public resources. Even within this small investment, the overwhelmingly large mass of the rain-fed small peasant are most neglected. India’s failure to ensure decent work to nearly nine of its 10 workers trapped in informal work also explains India’s losing hunger battle. India’s high growth is mostly jobless growth, which erodes completely the rationale for privileging business interests over those of impoverished populations. The historical inequities of gender, caste, tribe and religious minorities further aggravate those created by inequalities of wealth.
Upstream sources of India’s disgraceful hunger record include also its investment of just a little over 1 per cent of GDP in public health, lower than most countries of the world, and its chronic miscarriages in securing sanitation and clean water to all its populations. Downstream we see continuing chronic under-resourcing and corrupt implementation of important food and nutrition programmes such as the ICDS and school meals, the public distribution system, pensions for older persons, single women and the disabled, and maternity benefits. To address some of these, India passed the National Food Security Act 2013, which sought to guarantee half the calorie needs of two-thirds of the population, as well as universalize maternity benefits, young child and mother feeding, and school meals. But even when such Acts are passed, they are rarely acted upon with diligence and commitment. The union government and many states remain reluctant and neglectful in operationalizing these entitlements.
All of these point to not just morally reprehensible failures of the state, but to a much deeper social and cultural malaise. That the lives, deprivations and suffering of the poor do not matter. In this way, the Global Hunger Index is an indictment not just of our governments, but also of middle-class India itself, holding up a mirror to how little it cares.
This is the third in the annual series of India Exclusion Reports, in which the Centre for Equity Studies has tried to bring together a wide range of policy thinkers and actors, scholars, social advocates for more just and inclusive laws and policies and people of disadvantage themselves, together to examine carefully the record of the Indian State to ensure greater inclusion and access to the large mass of deprived and oppressed peoples. This is a modest effort, yet we are gratified to find that there are a growing number of readers of these reports who agree with the value of an enterprise like this that tries to create an informed report card about whether governments in India are ensuring equitable access of vulnerable communities to a range of public goods, but also to look closely at the most vulnerable communities as well. Considering that this year also marked the end of 25 years of neo-liberal growth which promised to erase poverty faster than was possible in the past, this report assumes for us a larger significance. The time had come, we are convinced, to think of a stable long-term institutional arrangement for the series of India Exclusion Reports. This is an experiment drawing many diverse actors and thinkers from many different silos but all concerned with a more just and humane society and State to write and reflect together. In that spirit, we believe that the structure that holds this enterprise of conceptualizing, researching, writing and disseminating the India Exclusion Reports should also be highly collaborative and plural, well outside the control of any one person or institution.
We are therefore proud that a number of leading international and national centres have joined the Centre for Equity Studies formally in this enterprise. These include Brown University, the International Institute of Social Studies in the Hague, and the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex; as well as leading national organizations including NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, which is one of India’s best national law schools with an equity focus, the Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Bangalore which specializes in urban studies, a premier social science research institution, and the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability. This partnership is based on a shared approach in terms of our understanding of issues of exclusion, social justice and the role of the state. Our attempt is to ensure that the Exclusion Reports are strongly evidence-based, empirical and carefully peer reviewed, to which all our collaborators and now joint owners contribute in many ways. But while all of these have independent programmes and views on many issues, all the many contributors and collaborators of these reports are bound together by shared normative and political convictions related to ideas of the just state, the just society, equity and solidarity.
In this overview chapter, we will try to summarize some of the highlights of the findings of this report. But before we do this, we felt since a quarter-century has passed since economic reforms were heralded in India, it would be fitting for the purposes of this report to reflect on what 25 years of economic reforms has meant for the massive underclass of India’s disadvantaged people.