Famished

Illustration by Akshaya Zachariah

Mridula Chari’s “Famished,” reprinted here, traces the history of hunger in India from a famine in 1876 to escalating food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The food rations, droughts, and effects of liberalization are really stories of the Indian state’s apathy. Even after passing a law, almost a decade ago, meant to end its hunger problem, India cannot — chooses not to, Chari argues — feed its people.

From Fifty Two, a website publishing one new work of longform nonfiction from India each week, “Famished” offers a richly researched argument about why millions of people starve every year. In the months since the piece first appeared in Fifty Two, the level of hunger in India has grown worse and, as “Famished” reminds us, a state that continuously chooses denial bears much responsibility.

— Alexandra Valahu, Guernica Global Spotlights editor

On March 19, 2021, Parshottam Rupala, Minister of State for Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare, gave Parliament an impromptu lesson in Indian tradition. “There is a tradition in our villages of feeding sheera to stray female dogs after they give birth,” he said in a charged statement in the Rajya Sabha. “In a country with such a tradition, we should not pay attention to some outsider who comes and tells us that our children are hungry.”

Rupala was responding to a question about India’s falling ranks in the Global Hunger Index over the years. India ranked among the ten largest food producers globally, Sanjay Singh of the Aam Aadmi Party had pointed out: why was it unable to distribute this food to its own people?

Rupala said the government had asked for the source of the Global Hunger Index’s figures but hadn’t received it. Just months earlier, however, its own Ministry of Health and Family Welfare released partial figures from the first phase of the fifth round of the National Family Health Survey. It showed that, in at least 13 states, Indian children are more severely undernourished than they were five years earlier.

The alarming statistics, from diverse sources, have been coming thick and fast. Between 45 and 64 percent of poor rural Indians may be unable to afford a nutritious diet. A UNICEF study has found that 880,000 children in India below the age of five died prematurely in 2018. Of those, 69 percent died of malnutrition. Economists have written about food insecurity shooting up during and after the COVID-19 lockdowns. Earlier this month, the NITI Aayog released a report highlighting the fact that eleven states, including the most populous ones, scored less than 50 out of 100 in reaching zero hunger.

This is a downslide. It is particularly shocking because, not even a decade ago, India enacted a law to ensure that Indians would be less hungry than before. In 2013, the second United Progressive Alliance government passed the National Food Security Act (NFSA), months before the general election that led to Narendra Modi’s victory. The legislation had passed on the back of an extensive Right to Food campaign.

The NFSA converted a bouquet of existing services and schemes into legal entitlements. These included programs familiar even to Indians who don’t use them, such as the Midday Meal scheme, which guarantees free cooked lunches at schools, and the services of the Public Distribution System (PDS), which promises grains at highly subsidized prices.

A large section of the population was already covered by these, but the point of the law was for the benefits to be seen as entitlements rather than sops. It meant that when it came to