When hunger strikes

Perhaps the one positive aspect to an otherwise grim story of chronic hunger in India is the more frequent public acknowledgement of this sorry state of affairs. In January, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described the prevalence of child undernourishment as a national shame when releasing the Hunger and Malnutrition Report 2011. India’s extremely low global ranking on quality of life indices used to be met with a smug denial until some years ago. That has slowly given way to an acknowledgement that the impressive growth of purchasing power among the upwardly mobile classes has remained anything but socially inclusive. The government’s draft food security bill has rightly been criticised for failing to codify universal entitlements to food. But a policy of huge procurement of grains — with its attendant wastage — would sooner rather than later be unsustainable when hunger remains a mass phenomenon. A particularly disturbing aspect of the ICDS figures on Mumbai is that the city’s north east suburb, notorious for its abysmally poor public health, maternal and child care services, is continuing on a downward spiral. This is the region that recorded an infant mortality rate twice the State average in 2009, as per the human development report for Greater Mumbai. The State government has now decided to set up an urban malnutrition mission, an idea worth replicating elsewhere.