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VIEWPOINT: FIFTH COLUMN
Grain
Of Untruth
Our leaders would rather let rats eat food stocks
than admit to starvation deaths
By Tavleen Singh
On the front page
of the Times of India a couple of weeks ago, there was a picture of a
starving Maharashtrian child. His ribs stuck out of skin that hung loosely
on his tiny frame, his arms and legs resembled matchsticks and his eyes
had the blank, unseeing gaze of the desperately under-nourished. The story
with the picture said the child was from Nandurbar district and more than
a thousand children had died of mysterious illnesses related to what our
officials call "under-nourishment" in the district in the past
six months.
The correct word is starvation but since the
word has been officially abolished in India, officials no longer dare
use it. The image of the child was so shaming that I imagined that at
least the Maharasthtra chief minister, if not the prime minister, would
have flown down to Nandurbar. We do, after all, have such an excess of
foodgrain in government warehouses at the moment-50 million tonnes instead
of the 17 million we require as a buffer-that starvation deaths anywhere
in India are an outrage.
 Emergency
measures in Maharashtra, one of our most advanced states, should be possible
within hours. But nothing has happened and nothing will, except by way
of a cover-up because for a government to admit to starvation deaths is
an admission of complete, utter, sickening failure. Our leaders would
rather let rats eat those millions of tonnes of foodgrain than save the
lives of children. If it were not for an intervention by the Supreme Court
last week the horror of Nandurbar would have been simply ignored.
Hopefully now it will remain in the public eye
because the Supreme Court has demanded that the Centre respond to a petition
filed by the People's Union of Civil Liberties which states that the Famine
Code of 1962 is being violated by several state governments. The Supreme
Court has issued notices to the governments of Orissa, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh,
Maharashtra, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh. The petition points out that
under the Famine Code "in times of famine every healthy person who
presents himself for work as part of the food-for-work scheme would be
provided with work". It adds that the right to food, which has been
upheld by the Supreme Court, implies that the state has a duty to provide
food to people who do not have the money to buy it.
Can we hope that this will galvanize state governments
into action? No, because over the years our officials have evolved a wondrous
system whereby state governments have become experts at pretending that
starvation does not exist. I have some personal experience of how this
is done, so let me tell you how it happens.
In 1987 there was a famine in Orissa's Kalahandi
and Koraput districts. I travelled to the affected villages-some so remote
they could only be reached on foot-and found that because of the failure
of the area's single annual crop, most people had lived on nothing but
birdseed for months. Children with bloated stomachs and matchstick limbs
lay dying in the mud huts in village after village. A government doctor
I met in one of the most desperate villages said he had been begging the
state government to send food supplies and all he had so far received
from Bhubaneswar was a consignment of antibiotics. "They are dying
of hunger," he said bitterly, "but the government sends medicines
because they want to pretend that there is an epidemic, not a famine."
When I returned to Delhi I provided a list of
the worst-affected villages to the Prime Minister's Office and because
of massive bad publicity in the press, Rajiv Gandhi himself flew down.
But here is what happened. Officials who arranged his tour ensured that
he visited only places where food kitchens had been set up and other emergency
measures taken. The story died with his visit and the fact that starvation
deaths still occur routinely in Orissa is evidence that the measures he
promised then have still not been taken.
The first reaction of state governments when
starvation deaths occur is to deny them and then prove themselves right.
Official "proof" comes in the form of long lists of the illnesses
that have caused the deaths. Since hunger itself is not a disease, these
are irrelevant. What we need instead are details of what the dying people
had by way of nourishment. This is the only way to establish starvation.
Now that the Supreme Court is watching, can
we hope that it orders the Maharashtra Government to send its officials
to Nandurbar and find out exactly what the dead children ate in the weeks
before they died? Can we also hope that the prime minister finds the time
to make a personal visit and that he orders-instead of just another inquiry-that
some of the foodgrains rotting in the godowns of the Food Corporation
of India be immediately distributed free in Nandurbar.
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