Unsolved Issue of Hunger in India

P.C.OutlookIndia

The issue of hunger in India could be justified with the suggestive phrase of French Political Scientist Jean Francois Bayart, that is " "the politics of the belly". 

The Annual Hunger Index,2020 provides the evidence where India stands as one of the least performing state, ranking at 94th out of 107th countries under the "serious" category. And which will not take much time to degrade to "alarming category" if proper measures are not taken as soon as possible. The pandemic and consequent lockdown have severely affected daily wage earners and migrant laborers.  

Why hunger is a political issue? The foremost answer rooted in the Constitution of India. The preamble itself uphold that India is a sovereign, socialist, republic, secular and democratic nation. And every democratic country have their own provisions of welfare schemes. India is the biggest democracy with 1.38 Billion population, in the world. But the unwillingness of the representatives and ill implementation of policies have drawn up a dusky future of these people. 

Notwithstanding, hunger has been a long standing problem of India, it needs serious attention of the policy makers. The issue has to be scrutinized minutely. The World Health Organization Report,2013 provides that, out of every three hungry child one is from India. And you would be astonished to know that half of the population of India remains undernourished. 

It was RTF (Right to Food) campaign that opened the door with a PIL to reduce hunger in the country. The fundamental feature of this campaign was that it was not an influenced mobilization from foreign countries, rather the villagers along with activists joined this campaign with total enthusiasm. The campaign was inspired to  find a solution to the corruption in the PDS (Public Distribution System). This was a great move since independence in India against eradicating the hunger issue.

However, this great effort from the activists like Aruna Roy, Shankar Singh and Nikhil Dey along with peoples from village played an outstanding role, which not only worked for the PDS but also added to the awareness of the people in the villages and also made the bureaucrats accountable to the people.

Having done all these to solve the hunger issue, still India is in the list of least working country to eradicate this black death of the society. Hence, there should be a bottom-up model, where panchayats should be held accountable by creating a standard scrutinizing agency far from political influence. The system of managing (by giving bribe) must be outrooted to perform good in providing one of the basic amenities of life ensured by the constitution of India. 

Like Anarchists' say, "State is a necessary evil", politics means same for the society. It means, we have to give a positive walk to politics by keeping the representatives accountable by strengthening institutions of the state. Otherwise, there're a lot of things that politics can damage. JP movement was one of the belligerent moves towards transparency beyond power politics that changed the structure of Indian politics which ultimately paved the way for a new government in 1977. Accordingly. food distribution needs un-interrupted (distant from corruption) communication system and stores to keep food grains in a long run.