Food And Hunger Under The Vajpayee Regime

Anamitra Roy Chowdhury

Shouvik Chakraborty

Taposik Banerjee

THE celebration of a supposedly ‘shining’ India by the Vajpayee regime is a cruel joke being played upon the hunger-stricken poor of our country. The latest report on the State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI 2003) published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has estimated that out of a total of 842 millions undernourished people in the world in 1999-2001, 214 millions, i.e. over 25 per cent, were in India alone (India has about 17 per cent of the world population). What is more alarming is the fact that the number of undernourished increased by the biggest magnitude in India (nearly 20 millions) compared to all other countries of the world during the period 1995-97 to 1999-01. Whoever is shining in India today, it is certainly not the undernourished millions who have become the worst victims of the Vajpayee government’s anti-poor policies.

DECLINING FOOD AVAILABILITY

Since the mid- 1990s the growth rate of foodgrains output has been lower than that of the population growth rate. As a result net foodgrains output per-capita has fallen from 181.59 kg in 1994-95 to 164.59 kg in 2002-03. Per-capita net availability (Net Availability = Net Output + Net Import – Change in Public Stocks), which is by definition equal to per-capita net absorption, has fallen much more drastically. In the year 2000-01, net per-capita availability of foodgrains had fallen to an all time low level of 151.06 kg. In the early 1990s it was 177 kg. (See Table 1 and Figure 1 below) As Utsa Patnaik points out that, “ By 2000-01 an average Indian family of four members was absorbing 93 kg less foodgrains, compared to a mere three years earlier” (Frontline, March 12, 2004).

TABLE 1

  Per capita foodgrains output and availability

 Figure 1

This drastic fall in food availability has been an outcome of the deflationary neoliberal policies pursued religiously by the Vajpayee government, which has had a severe adverse impact on the agriculture sector and the public distribution system. It should be noted that the data on per capita food availability are all-India averages across income classes, which implies that the worsening of the nutritional condition of the poor has been much more severe than what the averaged figures suggest.

DISMANTLING THE PDS

In 1997-98, the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) was introduced in India. All those who were not recognized by the government as poor or were not below the official poverty line were pushed out of the purview of the PDS. The restructuring of the PDS was ostensibly done in order to target subsidies to the poorest section of the population. The real reason, however, was to reduce food subsidies by denying the access to subsidized foodgrains to a large number of people. The distinction drawn between the Below Poverty Line (BPL) and Above Poverty Line (APL) segments of the population is itself questionable because the data and methodology used to draw the poverty line has been fudged and manipulated. The official poverty line in India can only be considered as a destitution line. Even the criteria used to identify BPL households were arbitrary and unjust. As a result we see for instance that for the entire population of Dharavi in Mumbai, which is Asia’s largest slum with half a million population, only 151 BPL ration cards have been issued. A large proportion of the population, which is vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition is thus left to purchase food from the open market.

Moreover, under the Vajpayee regime both BPL and APL prices of wheat and rice had been revised upwards and today both prices are higher than the prices that prevailed during universal PDS (See Table 2 below). Given the very low income and purchasing power of the poor, the increase in food prices could have only one possible impact — a decline in consumption of foodgrains by the poor. The increase in the issue prices for wheat and rice therefore led to a decline in foodgrains offtake from the PDS on the one hand and accumulation of huge stocks with the FCI on the other.

TABLE 2

PDS issue prices of

Wheat and rice (Rs / quintal)

POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SURPLUS FOODSTOCKS

The buffer stocks held by the government increased enormously at a time when newspapers were full of reports of starvation deaths, suicides and malnutrition from different parts of the country. By July 2002, 63 million tonnes of foodgrains stocks had piled up as against the minimum norm of 24.3 million tones (See Figure 2 below). The government had to incur huge carrying costs for holding these excess stocks of foodgrains, which obviously added to the food subsidies. Those subsidies, however, did not come to the benefit of the poor in terms of cheapening of food prices. Foodgrains were allowed to rot in godowns but not sold cheap to the starving masses during that period. Can there be a better example of an anti-people regime?

Figure 2

                    Source: Economic Survey, 2002-03

Although the government ran down the surplus foodgrains stocks eventually, a part of it through the schemes like Antodaya and the mid-day meals scheme, a big proportion of the stocks were exported by providing incentives including permitting exporters to lift foodgrains at BPL prices during November 2000 to December 2001. Therefore, while the poor during this period who happened to be above the official poverty line had to pay Rs 10.87 per kg of rice and Rs8.30 per kg of wheat; the same were being sold to exporters catering to markets outside the country at Rs 5.65 per kg rice and Rs 4.15 per kg wheat. According to the Economic Survey, India exported 9.6 million tonnes of foodgrains in 2002-03 (upto December) while the offtake from the PDS was 13.5 million tonnes (upto December). This policy of exporting foodgrains on the one hand and increasing the domestic price of foodgrains despite a significant proportion of the population remaining hungry on the other not only exposes the gross mismanagement of the food economy by the Vajpayee regime but also sheer insensitivity on its part towards hunger and livelihood of the poor.

The government and the policymakers have often put forward the argument that surplus food stocks were a result of `overproduction'. The Economic Survey 2001-02 argued that excess stocks were a surplus over what people voluntarily wished to consume, and represented a "problem of plenty". NSS data on falling share of cereals in the spending on food were quoted to argue that not only the well-to-do but all segments of the population were voluntarily diversifying their diets to high value foods away from cereals; for instance the former Director of Indian Agriculture Research Council, S K Sinha argued that, ''With the increase in per capita income, the health conscious people have changed their food habits and now prefer to have vegetables, eggs and milk instead of foodgrains.'' (news report in www.rediff.com dated February 18, 1999). This logic is completely fallacious because per capita availability of foodgrains includes not only direct consumption of cereals like wheat and rice but also the part converted to animal products by being used as feedgrains. The per capita availability or absorption of foodgrains always rises as a country’s per capita income rises not because people consume more foodgrains directly but because more animal products are consumed which in turn increases the indirect uses of foodgrains as fodder. China, with a per capita income about twice as much as India's, absorbed 325 kg per capita of foodgrains in the mid-1990s, compared to India's less than 200 kg at that time. Mexico during that period absorbed 375 kg per capita, high income Europe absorbed over 650 kg per capita and the United States absorbed the maximum, 850 kg per capita.

The abnormal trend in India of a sharply declining per capita foodgrains absorption while the average per capita income has been on a rise, is a reflection of increasing income inequalities. While the upper strata in both rural as well as urban areas have been diversifying their consumption away from cereals, the poor of the country, especially in the rural areas have been forced to consume less foodgrains under the Vajpayee regime, due to their reduced incomes on the one hand and increased food prices on the other. In the backdrop of increased hunger among the already impoverished masses of our country, the celebration of a ‘shining’ India seems appalling.