Hunger in India
Hunger in India
India, with a population of over 1.3 billion, has seen tremendous growth in the past two decades. Gross Domestic Product has increased 4.5 times and per capita consumption has increased 3 times. Similarly, food grain production has increased almost 2 times. However, despite phenomenal industrial and economic growth and while India produces sufficient food to feed its population, it is unable to provide access to food to a large number of people, especially women and children.
State of Hunger in India
According to FAO estimates in ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, 2018” report, 195.9 million people are undernourished in India. By this measure 14.8% of the population is undernourished in India. Also, 51.4% of women in reproductive age between 15 to 49 years are anaemic. Further according to the report 38.4% of the children aged under five in India are stunted (too short for their age), while 21% suffer from wasting, meaning their weight is too low for their height. Malnourished children have a higher risk of death from common childhood illnesses such as diarrhea, pneumonia, and malaria. The Global Hunger Index 2017 ranks India at 100 out of 119 countries on the basis of three leading indicators -- prevalence of wasting and stunting in children under 5 years, under 5 child mortality rate, and the proportion of undernourished in the population.
Food Loss & Food Waste
On the other hand, it is estimated that nearly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year gets lost or wasted. 40 percent of the fruits and vegetables, and 30 percent of cereals that are produced are lost due to inefficient supply chain management and do not reach the consumer markets. While significant levels of food losses occur upstream, at harvest and during post-harvest handling, a lot of food is lost or wasted during the distribution and consumption stages. Some food is also wasted on the shelves and in the warehouses of food businesses either due to excess production, introduction of new products, labeling errors, or due to shorter remaining shelf life. Such food could be salvaged by timely withdrawing it from the distribution network, aggregating it and then redirecting it to the people in need.
Key facts about hunger in India
Largest India is home to the largest undernourished population in the world
14.9% of our population is undernourished
195.9million people go hungry everyday
21.0% of children under 5 are underweight
38.4% of children under 5 years of age are stunted
1 in 4 children malnourished
Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations (FAO)
ప్రపంచ
Starvation deaths in 2018
Stunting due to hunger also holds back the prospects of an entire generation.
Written by Vikram Patel |
Updated: July 26, 2018 12:07:32 am
Patel is the Pershing Square Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School and is affiliated with the Public Health Foundation of India and Sangath
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starvation death, jharkhand starvation death, starvation deaths in india, Hunder index, UNICEF, poverty in India, BPL families in india, global hunger index, india ranking global hunger index, national health mission, Indian express
hose in power do all that is needed to prove that the person who died did so of “natural” causes, including resorting to ghoulish postmortems to find remnants of food in the victim’s stomach. (Partha Paul/Express File Photo)
Sections of the media and political establishment find it unthinkable that a person can die of starvation in India — we witnessed this recently when a 58-year old woman died in Jharkhand. The assumption, within a certain section, is that no one can die of hunger in this land of plenty and that government largesse ensures there is food in every belly. The very mention of the word “starvation” is enough to evoke hysterical reactions from our news anchors (needless to add, they don’t really need an issue to throw a tantrum). Opposition politicians shout themselves hoarse from their precarious moral high-ground. Those in power do all that is needed to prove that the person who died did so of “natural” causes, including resorting to ghoulish postmortems to find remnants of food in the victim’s stomach.
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For example, when 11-year-old Santoshi died in September last year, the Jharkhand government claimed that the child had died of an illness. However, Santoshi’s family contended that they had not been getting rations for six months before her death. The case of 58-year-old Savitri Devi is similar. Her fellow villagers contended that Savitri Devi had nothing to eat in her home because she was denied PDS rations since 2012 when her ration card was cancelled. But Jharkhand government officials claimed that Savitri Devi died of “illness” and not hunger.
This unseemly debate of whether people die of hunger or illness baffles those who can enjoy the luxury of digging into their generous serving of munchies. Starvation deaths in 2018? How absurd in a country which, we were recently informed, is the fastest-growing economy in the world. A country where surplus grain is eaten by rats. Hunger deaths are an evil from our colonial past. And the media hoopla over one death would surely indicate that such incidents were rare. To the well-heeled, it seems that India has, in fact, conquered hunger.
But the truth is somewhat more disturbing, for there is no debate at all about the fact that India is home to the largest number of malnourished people in the world. About a third of our children are stunted: As the word implies, their bodies (and, indeed, their brains) are less developed than they should be for their age. And there is one overwhelming reason for this damning observation: They have gone to bed, day after day, month after month, without enough food.
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UNICEF recently published a report estimating that malnutrition is a direct contributor to nearly half of all deaths under the age of five years. The final cause of death, of course, is never “starvation” or “hunger” but a more immediate ailment such as diarrhoea or pneumonia. But, the child dies because he or she is too weak from hunger, which has depleted the body of the necessary biological potions that would have staved off these diseases.
In other words, the child died of hunger.
How many children are we talking about in the case of India? More children under the age of five die in India than anywhere else in the world. A recent estimate puts this figure at over 1.5 million children a year—over 4,500 child deaths a day. A third of these could have been averted if children did not go to bed hungry night after night. These figures suggest that over 3,00,000 children die every year in India because of hunger. And for many children who escape death, the poverty of their parents means that hunger remains an unremitting part of their lives. Hunger does not stunt only the body, it also affects the brain. The result: An entire generation of children born into poverty with stunted intellectual development which traps them in the same poverty their parents lived with. A state of poverty which will ultimately kill them well before their fellow citizens who did not go hungry during childhood.
While it is plausible that the middle-aged people in desperate situations in Jharkhand and elsewhere did not die of acute starvation, it is more likely that their premature deaths were written into the scripts of their lives because they starved as children. It does not matter how fast our economy is growing when tens of millions of our children (and their families) go to bed hungry. Stunting due to hunger and its consequences on premature mortality is a major reason for the pathetic position India occupies in the human development league table of the world. It is also holding back the prospects of an entire generation of our children to survive and escape poverty. That it should be so prevalent, 70 years after Independence and with our food granaries stuffed, is nothing short of a national shame. As many other and much poorer countries have shown, eradicating hunger and stunting can be addressed but to do so will need action on an emergency scale. Only then will Indians stop dying of hunger.
India, with a population of over 1.3 billion, has seen tremendous growth in the past two decades. Gross Domestic Product has increased 4.5 times and per capita consumption has increased 3 times. Similarly, food grain production has increased almost 2 times. However, despite phenomenal industrial and economic growth and while India produces sufficient food to feed its population, it is unable to provide access to food to a large number of people, especially women and children.
State of Hunger in India
According to FAO estimates in ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, 2018” report, 195.9 million people are undernourished in India. By this measure 14.8% of the population is undernourished in India. Also, 51.4% of women in reproductive age between 15 to 49 years are anaemic. Further according to the report 38.4% of the children aged under five in India are stunted (too short for their age), while 21% suffer from wasting, meaning their weight is too low for their height. Malnourished children have a higher risk of death from common childhood illnesses such as diarrhea, pneumonia, and malaria. The Global Hunger Index 2017 ranks India at 100 out of 119 countries on the basis of three leading indicators -- prevalence of wasting and stunting in children under 5 years, under 5 child mortality rate, and the proportion of undernourished in the population.
Food Loss & Food Waste
On the other hand, it is estimated that nearly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year gets lost or wasted. 40 percent of the fruits and vegetables, and 30 percent of cereals that are produced are lost due to inefficient supply chain management and do not reach the consumer markets. While significant levels of food losses occur upstream, at harvest and during post-harvest handling, a lot of food is lost or wasted during the distribution and consumption stages. Some food is also wasted on the shelves and in the warehouses of food businesses either due to excess production, introduction of new products, labeling errors, or due to shorter remaining shelf life. Such food could be salvaged by timely withdrawing it from the distribution network, aggregating it and then redirecting it to the people in need.
Key facts about hunger in India
Largest India is home to the largest undernourished population in the world
14.9% of our population is undernourished
195.9million people go hungry everyday
21.0% of children under 5 are underweight
38.4% of children under 5 years of age are stunted
1 in 4 children malnourished
Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations (FAO)
ప్రపంచ
Starvation deaths in 2018
Stunting due to hunger also holds back the prospects of an entire generation.
Written by Vikram Patel |
Updated: July 26, 2018 12:07:32 am
Patel is the Pershing Square Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School and is affiliated with the Public Health Foundation of India and Sangath
FROM THIS AUTHOR
Mental illness often stems from early-life trauma. It’s happening in Kashmir
07 Aug 2019
Acts of love and caring are the most potent influences on our well-being
18 Jan 2019
A dose of hope
20 Dec 2018
starvation death, jharkhand starvation death, starvation deaths in india, Hunder index, UNICEF, poverty in India, BPL families in india, global hunger index, india ranking global hunger index, national health mission, Indian express
hose in power do all that is needed to prove that the person who died did so of “natural” causes, including resorting to ghoulish postmortems to find remnants of food in the victim’s stomach. (Partha Paul/Express File Photo)
Sections of the media and political establishment find it unthinkable that a person can die of starvation in India — we witnessed this recently when a 58-year old woman died in Jharkhand. The assumption, within a certain section, is that no one can die of hunger in this land of plenty and that government largesse ensures there is food in every belly. The very mention of the word “starvation” is enough to evoke hysterical reactions from our news anchors (needless to add, they don’t really need an issue to throw a tantrum). Opposition politicians shout themselves hoarse from their precarious moral high-ground. Those in power do all that is needed to prove that the person who died did so of “natural” causes, including resorting to ghoulish postmortems to find remnants of food in the victim’s stomach.
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For example, when 11-year-old Santoshi died in September last year, the Jharkhand government claimed that the child had died of an illness. However, Santoshi’s family contended that they had not been getting rations for six months before her death. The case of 58-year-old Savitri Devi is similar. Her fellow villagers contended that Savitri Devi had nothing to eat in her home because she was denied PDS rations since 2012 when her ration card was cancelled. But Jharkhand government officials claimed that Savitri Devi died of “illness” and not hunger.
This unseemly debate of whether people die of hunger or illness baffles those who can enjoy the luxury of digging into their generous serving of munchies. Starvation deaths in 2018? How absurd in a country which, we were recently informed, is the fastest-growing economy in the world. A country where surplus grain is eaten by rats. Hunger deaths are an evil from our colonial past. And the media hoopla over one death would surely indicate that such incidents were rare. To the well-heeled, it seems that India has, in fact, conquered hunger.
But the truth is somewhat more disturbing, for there is no debate at all about the fact that India is home to the largest number of malnourished people in the world. About a third of our children are stunted: As the word implies, their bodies (and, indeed, their brains) are less developed than they should be for their age. And there is one overwhelming reason for this damning observation: They have gone to bed, day after day, month after month, without enough food.
Advertising
UNICEF recently published a report estimating that malnutrition is a direct contributor to nearly half of all deaths under the age of five years. The final cause of death, of course, is never “starvation” or “hunger” but a more immediate ailment such as diarrhoea or pneumonia. But, the child dies because he or she is too weak from hunger, which has depleted the body of the necessary biological potions that would have staved off these diseases.
In other words, the child died of hunger.
How many children are we talking about in the case of India? More children under the age of five die in India than anywhere else in the world. A recent estimate puts this figure at over 1.5 million children a year—over 4,500 child deaths a day. A third of these could have been averted if children did not go to bed hungry night after night. These figures suggest that over 3,00,000 children die every year in India because of hunger. And for many children who escape death, the poverty of their parents means that hunger remains an unremitting part of their lives. Hunger does not stunt only the body, it also affects the brain. The result: An entire generation of children born into poverty with stunted intellectual development which traps them in the same poverty their parents lived with. A state of poverty which will ultimately kill them well before their fellow citizens who did not go hungry during childhood.
While it is plausible that the middle-aged people in desperate situations in Jharkhand and elsewhere did not die of acute starvation, it is more likely that their premature deaths were written into the scripts of their lives because they starved as children. It does not matter how fast our economy is growing when tens of millions of our children (and their families) go to bed hungry. Stunting due to hunger and its consequences on premature mortality is a major reason for the pathetic position India occupies in the human development league table of the world. It is also holding back the prospects of an entire generation of our children to survive and escape poverty. That it should be so prevalent, 70 years after Independence and with our food granaries stuffed, is nothing short of a national shame. As many other and much poorer countries have shown, eradicating hunger and stunting can be addressed but to do so will need action on an emergency scale. Only then will Indians stop dying of hunger.
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