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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Food is a Necessity, So is Making it Available -Hari Vasudevan

-Newsclick.in

Today's India has revealed a social innocence about genuine starvation and want, limiting public capacity to make demands of the state.

Food is a necessity.  Several generations in India regard this home-truth as a stark fact that they have been brought up to respect, either due to experience, or through memory.  In some cases, such generations have lived on the edge of India's many Kalahandis, normally ignored, because they are ephemeral, though repetitive, in a fast-changing globalised economy. Or, they have been brought up with those whose recollections stretch back to the Bengal Famine or the perpetual food shortages of the 1940s and 1950s, when India's Public Distribution System (PDS) took shape. For them, there is no doubt about a self-evident matter: starvation means death the hard way, and India, aspiring tothe status of a great power, whether under Jawaharlal Nehru or Narendra Modi, has sought to fight it, but is equally susceptible to it.  Another obvious truth is that starvation is not necessarily the outcome of unavailability of produce; it comes from the inability to use and distribute.

At the height of India’s COVID-19 crisis, these simple truths seem to have escaped India's Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution and the agencies that are meant to make India’s vast buffer stocks available to tramping legions of migrants. The Prime Minister has stated his concern. The Finance Minister has made the allocation. But confusion reigns supreme about what to do, and privation is a dreadful reality.

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