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Indian poor starve while grain rots in depots
Published: 11 August, 2010, 06:53
Edited: 31 August, 2010, 11:02
India, Hyderabad : Indian schoolchildren prepare to queue for food served.(AFP Photo / Noah Seelam)
(12.4Mb) embed videoTAGS: Children, Health, Scandal, India
India is home to one quarter of the world's starving population and one third of its malnourished children while, at the same time, maintaining a surplus of food grain in government storage areas.
In the village of Danapur in Eastern India, villager Rita says she has had nothing to feed her son for four days.
“My hungry child cries all the time, there is no food to feed him. How can we survive like this? To keep the child quiet I make him drink water,” Rita says.
Yet the government has record amounts of surplus stocks: 59 million tons of wheat and rice. It does have a huge public distribution system that provides free food to families below the poverty line. But corruption and complex bureaucracy means the poorest of the poor often don't make it onto the list.
“We are poor people and are desperate for food to eat. Our children go to sleep hungry. Our names are not on the government’s poverty list and we don’t get any food grain from the government. We can we do?” questions labourer Jugari Paswan. “Ultimately we will have no choice but to commit suicide.”
With people starving, the recent images of piles of wheat rotting at a storage facility erupted into a major political issue. In the state of Punjab, it was discovered that 49,000 tons of food grain had perished.
Subhash Zadoo , the General Manager of Food Corporation of India based in Delhi, explains that “Despite FCI taking precautions, there is every likelihood, as we have in a household, that whenever you are pouring a cup of tea from a kettle, that two spoons can spill over on the table. And if you see a thumb rule in FCI, vis-à-vis the total food grain which we handle, our losses – they are not in that huge abundance.”
In the largest food storage depot in the capital New Delhi, grain is safe in permanent warehouses with fixed roofs. But when it is stored temporarily with just a plastic cover to keep out the rain, it can last only one year. And with the government keeping 17 million tons of wheat and rice stored like this because it doesn’t have enough permanent warehouses, the scale of the problem becomes apparent.
Experts say about 10 million tons – enough to feed 140 million people for a month – has been stored during at least one monsoon and is at risk of rotting. If this grain were released instead, it could help those most in need. But distributing it would cost US$1 billion, and the government cannot afford to add it to its food subsidy.
That does not come as good news for Rakesh Kumar and his family, who depend on the handouts.
“We cannot afford to buy rice for our family. Whatever food grain the government has, it is allowing it to rot in its warehouses,” Rakesh Kumar grieves. “The ration cards they issue don’t reach the actual poor. Whatever rice is distributed to the local dealer for us, is instead sold by him in the open market.”
With global wheat prices rising due to the drought in Russia, if India loses its wheat stocks to poor storage this could fuel the price surge and that would hit the poor in India the hardest.
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I thought RT presented news without bias, but seeing insulting half stories about India has proved me wrong. Rt is getting as bad as the BBC. You pick on tiny isolated incidences and blame the whole country for it. You only show the negative, but not the massive good deeds.Ofcourse no system is going to be perfect and RT exploits this fact, just as the BBC and CNN and SKY do about Russia and every other country who disagree with them.Come on RT, give us balance.
India are spending Billions of Dollars on high tech military equipment, they are spending more billions on developing and expanding thier nuclear weapons programs, even more billions are going on building a modern space program (they are even planning to send a man to the moon in the next decade). All this apparent advancement and progress, yet they still cannot even feed thier own people. It is a discrace that all this wealth has failed to benefit the poor majority. Corruption? I don't know, but it is clear that the leaders care more about how the outside world percieve them than the welfare of thier own citizens.
I am an Indian and for what I know, the present government is installed by the IMF-World Bank and this is what they are best at, starving the poor world wide, arming the neighbors then loan them all to hell. My dad once told me that its not only hopeless, but its completely worthless to hope for a government that won't be a corrupt one. What I should say that the present IMF-World Bank installed Indian government cannot be trusted. Latest example is of stalling the MiG-35 after signing a contract just because they are bribing lots of easy money along Eurofighters which is a copy of Raphael and both loaded with American parts inside and will cost 4 times. It was Russia who gave us Indians not only our first Air Force fighter but also the license to make MiGs of our own. To be honest we don't even deserve that, we are among the world's top most corrupt nations.