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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The Hunger Pandemic -CP Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh

The Hunger Pandemic -CP Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh

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published Published on May 18, 2021   modified Modified on May 19, 2021

-The Hindu Business Line/ NetworkIdeas.org

The disease ripping through the country is only one of the destructive forces affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians. The dramatic increase in hunger is another. Like devastation wrought by the current surge in coronavirus infections, this too is the result of policy failure and official callousness. It is already causing immense suffering among affected people and will have serious repercussions on their future health and physical resilience.

Everyone knows that the brutal national lockdown imposed in March 2020 and the subsequent economic collapse led to loss of livelihood among people who had little or no ability to withstand such a shock. Official “relief” measures were so minor compared to the need that they could only provide a drop in the ocean for crores who faced falling incomes and inability to meet their basic needs. The provision of 5 kg free food grain rations per month to NFSA card holders from April to November barely touched the surface of the problem, even as it excluded at least 100 million people who were not part of NFSA lists.

Yet the full extent of the humanitarian catastrophe was possibly still not evident to most commentators, without data to indicate how food consumption had actually been affected. A new report from Hunger Watch, based on a survey of 3994 households conducted over 11 states in October 2020, provides a horrifying picture. The survey was purposively designed to cover weaker sections of the population, with 79 per cent of respondents having household income of less than Rs 7,000. This is broadly representative of the population, but also captures the group that relief measures should seek to benefit.

The survey provides stark evidence of the degree to which basic material conditions and access to food had worsened by October 2020. The survey report is very rich and contains a wealth of data, but some of the more important points deserve to be highlighted. First, as shown in Figure 1, almost all households reported falling income – only 6 per cent said their income had not changed while another 4 per cent could not say. 27 per cent of households had no income at all over the period from the start of the lockdown to October 2020, while for another 24 per cent their incomes had halved. Income declines of this severity are nothing less than catastrophic.

Please click here to read more.

Kindly click here to access the Hunger Watch Report (released in May 2021) by Right to Food Campaign and Centre for Equity Studies.


The Hindu Business Line/ NetworkIdeas.org, 18 May, 2021, https://www.networkideas.org/featured-articles/2021/05/the-hunger-pandemic/


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