Malnutrition : India's Shame

To most of us hunger pangs are that happen when our lunch is delayed by one hour… Have you imagined a situation where People don’t remember when they had their last meal? And don’t know when the next one will come? There is no food grain in the house for the next meal? A meal comprises boiled roots, so bitter that they have to be cut open and washed in running water for a day before cooking? Labour contractors feel the muscles of labourers standing in the market (in a main square in Ranchi) to ascertain their ‘working’ ability? Slave market anybody? Since our independence (1947), malnutrition had been and infact is in state of wordless emergency in India
Though UNICEF reports and Brinda Karat recently highlighted that like Ethiopia, one in every two children in India is malnourished, the ministry of food and public distribution, which is the nodal agency to provide food security in the country, was making disastrous policy proposals to government. Approved by food minister Sharad Pawar, the proposals, ostensibly to  meet the 59 lakh tonnes wheat deficit expected by April 2007, include the hiking of prices in the public distribution system (PDS), a cut in allocations of ration quotas, even to below poverty line households, and elimination of the food component in wages in 
governmentsponsored employment schemes. At a time when the prices of essential commodities are skyrocketing, any measure to further weaken PDS will destroy families in rural India,  90 per cent of whom according to the National Family Health Survey spend over 60 per cent of their income just on food.
Even though the evolution of public distribution of grains in India had its origin in the ‘rationing’ system introduced by the British during the World War II, In view of the fact that the rationing system and its successor, the public distribution system (PDS) has played an important role in attaining higher levels of the household food security and completely eliminating the threats of famines from the face of the country, it will be in the fitness of things that its evolution, working and efficacy are examined in some details before making huge changes that render it irrelevant. Already the introduction of the BPL ration cards in spite of the many inaccuracies in their issue has removed the middle class from the rationing ambit(Many people used to hold on to ration cards not because of food grains but because they served as identity cards).
The present PDS can hardly be described as a safety net. Each and every Indian and also some ghost card holders, presently constitute the unorganized crowd that jostles under the ungainly net, nobody knowing who is able to receive the shelter under it or who, requiring such shelter badly, is being kept out or pushed out. In this vast country, with millions of poor, we cannot dispense with the net altogether; there is therefore, no option but to mend the net, erect it afresh with only the needy households under it.

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