By Nilratan Shende

India has effectively managed to avert famines post-Independence owing to the green revolution and food policies, which have brought in a network of over 0.6 million fair price shops through Public Distribution Systems (PDS).

However, hunger continues to be a grim problem in India, and an unacceptable circumstance, particularly in the backdrop of the modern world and amidst immense wealth. Keeping in mind this dichotomy of development, the Government of India has introduced National Food Security Bill (NFSB) 2011 in the Parliament and has objectives pertaining to the elimination of hunger and widespread malnutrition among children in India. The country waited 65 years to introduce such a critical bill, which is its first serious step towards acknowledging citizens’ right to food. The PDS was more oriented towards service delivery but the introduction of the food security bill has provided legitimacy to citizens’ right to food.

The NFSB is in line with the international commitment of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the international covenant for social economic and cultural rights, the convention on elimination of all forms of discrimination against women that India is signatory to, and the Indian constitutional right to life.

The NFSB has an inclusive approach, which is reflected through its coverage, and provides entitlements for special groups like migrants, the homeless and destitute, and people with disabilities. It is a progressive step to include these groups of people as research studies have brought to light the vulnerability of migrants, homeless and destitute people, as they do not have due legal PDS entitlements. The coverage of excluded categories will provide access to grain at the migration location, which would reduce their vulnerability.

The bill divides groups in two categories — “priority households” and “general households”. The bill covers 75% of the rural population, of which 48% belong to the priority category. Likewise, the bill also covers up to 50 % of urban population of which 28% belong to priority households.  The bill provides maternal benefits to 22.5 million pregnant and lactating women.  It offers 7 kg of food grain per person per month to general households. The bill proposes to distribute coarse grain, wheat and rice  to priority households @ Rs 1/2/3 per kg  and general households are entitled for 3 kg per person per month at a price not exceeding half the minimum support price being paid to farmers (in case of rice, derived levy price).

However, the Bill has been criticised for its targeted approach. With the introduction of priority and general household categories, it continued its adherence to targeting approach. The shift highlighting adherence to targeting can be observed from APL / BPL to Priority households and general households. Successful lessons from universal targeting in the states of Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh and Kerala should have been replicated in the rest of India.

Although the bill is promising, there has been criticism from activists on account of dismantling PDS, lack of nutritional security, over-emphasis on cash transfers, lack of legal guarantee and punishment for non-compliance with entitlements.

If India has to eradicate its widespread hunger, it needs to focus on strengthening its mechanism and address concerns related to exclusion, improving nutritional security, cash transfer modalities, legal accountability, effective implementation of the schemes and overcome challenges in realisation of individual and household food security.

Nilratan Shende is Projects Director at Mumbai Smiles NGO and has done a PhD research paper on ‘Food insecurity, hunger and starvation deaths in Maharshtra: A case study of Melghat’

Also see Malnutrition deaths in Maharashtra: Paradox of development

The views expressed here are the author’s  own.

By Aditi Seshadri

It’s now been nearly two years since the watershed Right to Education Act 2009 — making education a fundamental right for every child between the ages of 6 and 14 years — was implemented in India but, as the recently published Annual Status of Education Report 2011 (ASER 2011) by NGO Pratham reveals, things are not going quite to plan.

One of the findings of the survey (which covered 6.3 lakh children across India in over 16,000 villages) is that enrolment in private schools continues to grow nationally – increasing from 18.7% in 2006 to 25.6% in 2011 – implying that faith in government-run institutions is diminishing. In fact, according to ASER 2011 data, 30-50% of children in the rural areas of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh are enrolled in private schools.

There was a time when low-income families preferred to send their kids to work rather than to a classroom. But times, and aspirations, have changed with a growing number of poor parents seeing education as the way out of poverty. Despite this, it’s clear that parents are unwilling to put their faith in the state.

And with good reason: According to the ASER 2011 findings, more than half of the students in Class V in rural India cannot read the text taught in class II in 2011. In fact, across many North Indian states, reading levels of Class V students declined by around 5% from 2010 to 2011. Also, although enrolment is high, there’s been a national level dip in actual attendance of classes in rural primary schools.

These numbers are an example of why more parents prefer to scrape together the money and place their children in low-cost private schools, which although following the same rote-learning teaching methods, can at least guarantee the teachers’ attendance, basic infrastructure and, often, English as the medium of instruction. Years of government school apathy led to the mushrooming of tens of thousands of private schools — run by trusts, charities, non-profit organisations, etc — to meet a growing demand for good education.

Now, there’s reason for these private institutions to worry: The Act has formulated a set of regulations — such as teacher-student ratios, classroom size and parental involvement — that schools must comply with, before 2013, or they could face closure.

This has led to predictions that private schools, already struggling to meet the norms, will have to close down by the droves. Union Education Minister Sibal has dismissed these claims, and was quoted as saying: “We’ve given them [private schools] three years’ time. We hope that is enough”.

But, what if it isn’t? While elite schools are filing lawsuits to bide time, what is going to happen to the schools that serve the poor?

Aditi Seshadri is Head of Communications at Mumbai Smiles NGO and Editor, Mumbai Action.

The views expressed here are the author’s  own and do not necessarily reflect that of any person or organisation.

Support from initially hostile Muslim clerics means disease is rapidly vanishing, even in city where it had the strongest hold

Moradabad is a nondescript and scruffy city, 110 miles north of the Indian capital Delhi. Few have heard of it, despite its population of nearly five million. But it is about to become the site of an astonishing victory against a terrible disease.

Moradabad has long been the centre of one of the most stubborn concentrations of polio in India.

The disease is passed on by person-to-person contact and, with Moradabad’s poor inhabitants frequently travelling far across the country in search of work, outbreaks elsewhere have often been traced back to the city.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) stipulates that three years must pass without any cases of polio occurring before a region can be declared polio-free.

Moradabad, which only recently had 60-80 cases a year, is expected to qualify in 2012.

“This will be a wonderful thing – for us, for India, for the people of Moradabad,” said Dr Mohammed Arif, a public health specialist and organiser of anti-polio campaigns in the area.

There is a bigger national milestone on the horizon. If in India as a whole there are no more confirmed cases before 13 January, the country will have completed its first year without a new victim.

Read the full story by Jason Burke in The Guardian.

By Nilratan Shende

India has witnessed a series of changes and experienced transition from the repeated hunger and famine crisis to self-sufficiency in food, poor industrial growth and infrastructure to sizeable industrial and economic growth and not to mention scientific technological strides. It appears that India presents a dichotomous and paradoxical picture of accelerating economic growth on one hand and, persistent malnutrition, starvation deaths on the other. However, mere self-sufficiency in food does not ensure nutritional and food security at the regional and household level. Hunger and starvation deaths are brought into the spotlight by the media and intervention of the civil society organisation in the states of Orissa, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh. Malnutrition deaths are not native to the regions of Nandurbar, Melghat, and Chandrapur in one of the developed state of India, Maharashtra.

Malnutrition deaths of children amidst self sufficiency of food brings to light importance of access to food, and underlines mere self-sufficiency is not adequate to ensure individual level food security. It is also reflected in the prevalence of malnutrition and starvation deaths among children in rural, tribal and pockets of slums in urban area. The availability of food stock on one hand and prevalence of chronic hunger on the other present a glaring contrast.

The judiciary has played an extremely important role by taking note of three public interest litigations filed in the High Court, which has directed the state to protect and ensure right of life under article 21. In 1997, the High Court further directed the state government to implement a 19-point programme to deal with malnutrition deaths of the children.

In 2004, the High Court took cognisance of media reports and observed the lack of implementation of the government schemes and criticised the state government. However, even a proactive judicial role could not avert malnutrition deaths in Maharashtra. It can be supplemented by Women and Child Development Minister Varsha Gaikwad statement in the legislative assembly on December 2011, wherein she states that in the last four years, that is, 2008-9 to 2011-12, 117493 children have died of malnutrition in the state of Maharashtra.

The State has often attributed malnutrition and resultant deaths to a culture of poverty and social beliefs prevailing in the community. However, issues related to basic health and educational infrastructure, lack of service delivery, inefficient bureaucracy, failure of proper implementation of the schemes, forest policies that affect the livelihood of tribals, access and control over productive agricultural and forest resources, is hardly deliberated.

If the government and opposition together do not demonstrate strong political will to eradicate a social evil like malnutrition, children will continue to die, and the paradox of development vis-à-vis social injustice and lack of equal opportunity will continue to be a burning issue.

Nilratan Shende is Projects Director at Mumbai Smiles NGO and has done his a PhD research paper on ‘Food insecurity, hunger and starvation deaths in Maharshtra: A case study of Melghat’

The views expressed here are the author’s  own and do not necessarily reflect that of any person or organisation.

The re-classification of villages and towns, and the changes this brings to the nation’s rural-urban profile, happens every decade. Yet only Census 2011 shows us a huge turnaround, with urban India adding more people (91 million) than rural India (90.6 million) for the first time in 90 years. Clearly, something huge has happened in the last 10 years that drives those numbers. And that is: huge, uncharted migrations of people seeking work as farming collapses. We may be looking at — and missing — this cruel drama in the countryside. A drama of millions leaving their homes in search of jobs that are not there. Of villages swiftly losing able-bodied adults, leaving behind the old, hungry and vulnerable. Of families that break up as their members head in diverse directions.

Read full article in The Hindu.

Even in countries where progress has been made towards the millennium development goals, rising inequality between rich and poor threaten civil society and economic growth, writes Sir Richard Jolly in The Guardian.

The incomes of the richest sections of society are soaring in the UK, China and India, and in most other countries as well. The poorest groups are seeing slow improvements at best, and often decline. Recent estimates indicate that at the current rate it will take more than 800 years for the bottom billion of the world population to achieve 10% of global income.

The UN general assembly began its 66th session last week. Many of the heads of state attending will no doubt report on their country’s progress towards the millennium development goals. They’re also likely to discuss the targets that will succeed the MDGs after 2015. However, there will almost certainly be a looming gap in these presentations: the rising inequalities between and within countries.

Read the article in The Guardian.

The Jan Lokpal Bill 2011 is an incomplete document that Team Anna and watchful members of civil society need to fully work out if the aspirations of millions who have been fired by the campaign for a corruption-free India are to be met, says Chitta Beherain in InfoChange.

The Jan Lokpal Bill, 2011, version 2.3, which is now in Parliament, is certainly a much better draft than its predecessors. If enacted, it will carry the anti-corruption crusade, begun with the RTI Act, 2005, to a logical conclusion. As all of us know, it is the RTI Act that helped unearth huge scams relating to the Commonwealth Games, Adarsh Housing Complex, and 2G spectrum. But it is not within this Act’s jurisdiction to investigate, prosecute and punish the perpetrators of corruption. It is precisely to fulfil this indispensable need to build a corruption-free polity that the Jan Lokpal Bill was mooted by social activist Anna Hazare.

The Jan Lokpal Bill, 2011, version 2.3, which is now in Parliament, is certainly a much better draft than its predecessors. If enacted, it will carry the anti-corruption crusade, begun with the RTI Act, 2005, to a logical conclusion. As all of us know, it is the RTI Act that helped unearth huge scams relating to the Commonwealth Games, Adarsh Housing Complex, and 2G spectrum. But it is not within this Act’s jurisdiction to investigate, prosecute and punish the perpetrators of corruption. It is precisely to fulfil this indispensable need to build a corruption-free polity that the Jan Lokpal Bill was mooted by social activist Anna Hazare.

Read the full article in InfoChange.

Much has been spoken and written of India’s “demographic dividend.” With almost 40% of the population – around 500 million people – under the age of 15, it is estimated that around 25% of the global workforce will be Indian by 2030. What this means is that the quality of education that young Indian children are receiving today is going to impact us all in the near future.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has committed to significantly enhancing outlays for the education sector and Human Resource Development Minister Kabil Sibal even came out with some bold, interesting proposals for education reform. For a time, there was spirited debate in the country on the measures needed to be taken but the government is yet to move forward on key policy decisions. Many commentators attribute the United Progressive Alliance government’s reluctance to political caution. There is, for instance, considerable opposition to allowing foreign investment in higher education.

The government has responded by commissioning studies and setting up a maze of committees to decide the best course of action. These are convenient tools to delay any sort of commitment and to buy time. Unfortunately, an arcane regulatory framework and a fractured polity only help matters in this case. But it would be difficult to overstate how important it is for India to act swiftly in order to reap the full benefits of its demographic slant.

Read the full article by Rakesh Mani in the Wall Street Journal.

Abhijit V Banerjee and Esther Duflo have brought a rare microeconomic focus to development economics. Steering clear of a yellow brick road out of poverty, they tell us why we should take the poor seriously, writes Niranjan Rajadhyaksha in Mint Lounge

A chance encounter between a hungry economist and a woman selling dosas on a street would not be worthy of mention—unless the economist happens to be Abhijit V. Banerjee.

The two met in one of the poor neighbourhoods of Guntur, a small town in Andhra Pradesh. At around 9 one morning, the 49-year-old economics professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was tempted to buy a dosa for breakfast. The street was lined with women selling fresh dosas. Banerjee and a local colleague walked up to a woman in a cream-coloured sari, who seemed to be less busy than the others…

Read the full article in Mint Lounge.

By Aditi Seshadri

India is the fourth most dangerous country in the world for women, after Afghanistan, Congo and Pakistan, according to a survey published last week, primarily because of its skewed sex ratio and human trafficking.

Conducted by Trustlaw, a legal news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation, the poll asked 213 gender experts from five continents to rank countries based on their overall perception of danger as well as six categories of risks — health, sexual violence, nonsexual violence, harmful practices rooted in culture, tradition or religion, lack of access to economic resources and human trafficking. The poll covered not just “hidden dangers” such as lack of education opportunities and healthcare but also rape and murder.

Poor healthcare, nonsexual violence and poverty made Afghanistan the most dangerous country for women, while the Democratic Republic of Congo — named ‘the rape capital of the world by the United Nations’ — was ranked second because of staggering levels of sexual violence. Neighbour Pakistan ranked third because of its cultural, tribal and religious practices that are detrimental to women (including acid attacks, child and forced marriage and punishment or retribution by stoning), while Somalia ranked fifth due to its high maternal mortality, rape, female genital mutilation and child marriage.

Female foeticide, infanticide and human trafficking are the main reasons why India figures on the list. The survey says nearly 12 million girls were aborted in the last three decades, and an estimated 50 million girls are thought to be missing over the past century due to female infanticide and foeticide.

Here is the irony: We have a female President and Lok Sabha Speaker, four women chief ministers, a woman who heads the ruling coalition and a female Opposition leader in the Lok Sabha, yet there are women deprived of their basic right to be born.

Clearly India’s economic progress hasn’t reflected in an improved status for the girl child — the 2011 Census found the sex ratio for South Mumbai (home to many of Mumbai’s richest residents) to have dropped to 874 girls for every 1,000 boys, from 922 as per the 2001 Census. (Read about it here).

And then there’s the issue of trafficking. In 2009, the CBI estimated that 90 per cent of trafficking took place within India and there were around 3 million prostitutes, 40 per cent of them minors. “The practice is common but lucrative so it goes untouched by government and police”, said Cristi Hegranes of the Global Press institute.

The report also said that, according to a US State Department report on trafficking in 2010, in addition to sex slavery, other forms of trafficking include forced labour and forced marriage. The report also found slow progress in criminal prosecutions of traffickers.

All of this begs the question, how come we don’t see marches and fasts to protest the plight of our women?

More facts from the survey:

1. AFGHANISTAN

Beleaguered by insurgency, corruption and dire poverty, Afghanistan ranked as most dangerous to women overall and came out worst in three of the poll’s key risk categories: health, non-sexual violence and economic discrimination.

• Women in Afghanistan have a one in 11 chance of dying in childbirth.
• Some 87 pct of women are illiterate.
• 70-80 pct of girls and women face forced marriages.

2. CONGO

Still reeling from a 1998-2003 war and accompanying humanitarian disaster that killed 5.4 million, Democratic Republic of Congo ranked second due mainly to staggering levels of sexual violence.

• About 1,150 women are raped every day, or some 420,000 a year, according to a recent report in the American Journal of Public Health.
• The Congolese Women’s Campaign Against Sexual Violence puts the number of rapes at 40 women a day.
• 57 pct of pregnant women are anaemic.

3. PAKISTAN

Those polled cited cultural, tribal and religious practices harmful to women, including acid attacks, child and forced marriage and punishment or retribution by stoning or other physical abuse.

• More than 1,000 women and girls are victims of honour killings every year, according to Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission.
• 90 pct of women in Pakistan face domestic violence.

4. INDIA

Female foeticide, child marriage and high levels of trafficking and domestic servitude make the world’s largest democracy the fourth most dangerous place for women, the poll showed.

• 100 million people, mostly women and girls, are involved in trafficking in one way or another, according to former Indian Home Secretay Madhukar Gupta.
• Up to 50 million girls are missing over the past century due to female infanticide and foeticide.
• 44.5 pct of girls are married before the age of 18.

5. SOMALIA

One of the poorest, most violent and lawless countries, Somalia ranked fifth due to a catalogue of dangers including high maternal mortality, rape, female genital mutilation (FGM) and child marriage.

• 95 pct of women face FGM, mostly between the ages of 4 and 11.
• Only 9 pct of women give birth at a health facility.
• Only 7.5 pct of parliament seats are held by women.

Aditi Seshadri is Head of Communications at Mumbai Smiles NGO and Editor, Mumbai Action.

The views expressed here are the author’s  own and do not necessarily reflect that of any person or organisation.