Hunger gnaws at a large number in India
The Hunger Watch report, released by the Right to Food Campaign on Wednesday, February 23 at the Press Club of India, New Delhi, offers worrying numbers about food, nutrition and equity.
Nationally, 79 per cent of the sample reported some form of food insecurity [in the month preceding the survey] and an alarmingly high 25 per cent reported severe food insecurity. Further, 41 per cent of the households said the nutritional quality of their diet deteriorated compared to the pre-pandemic period.
Only 34 per cent of the overall sample reported that their household’s cereal consumption in the month preceding the survey was sufficient.
Closely related to food security is the fact that 66 per cent said their income had decreased as compared to pre-pandemic period.
Further, about 45 per cent of families have some form of debt and 67 per cent cannot afford cooking gas—a much-publicised thrust area in Prime Minister Modi’s first term.
Interestingly, these numbers have come up despite, as per the same survey, 84 per cent of the households had a ration card and over 90 per cent of those who had any ration card that is eligible for subsidised grains, said they received some foodgrains. Therefore, government help was clearly not sufficient.
The above numbers are the findings from the Hunger Watch-II survey, which covered over 6,500 people across 14 states (Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Delhi, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka and Bengal. Seventy-one per cent of the respondents were women.
The Right to Food Campaign, in association with the Centre for Equity Studies and a number of other networks, conducted the survey during the period from December 2021 to January 2022.
In November 2020, they had conducted the first round of the survey, called Hunger Watch-I, to measure the impact of the national lockdown.
The surveys have three broad objectives, according to the report: to track and document the hunger situation among vulnerable communities; to coordinate local action demanding access to rights and entitlements as a follow-up to the survey; and to draw public attention to the scale of the problem and build public consciousness around the prevailing situation of hunger in the country.
