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Toronto:
In this Year of India in Canada, India is making news in the media
here - not for the second highest growth rate in the world but for
its "absolute poverty'' and failure to "feed its people.''
The Canadian media has also likened "the boom in Bihar" to "a
whimper".
Writing under the headline 'Why India can't feed its people,' the
country's biggest daily Toronto Star reported from New Delhi
Sunday, "Food is an all-consuming crisis here. Waste is only one
facet. Agriculture, infrastructure, inflation, innovation and
corruption are others. It is a scourge and challenge for this
country of 1.2 billion people...''
According to it, "40 percent of Indian children remain chronically
malnourished,'' with this figure in some parts of India even
higher than some sub-Saharan countries.
Citing reports of hungry children eating mud in parts of Uttar
Pradesh, the newspaper story said, "Today, there is less food
available for each Indian resident that there was 30 years ago. In
2008, the most recent year for which statistics are available,
India produced 436 grams of food grains per person per day, a drop
from 445.3 in 2006.''
The report said, "As much as 40 per cent of all the fruits,
vegetables and food grains grown in India never make it to the
market. The country wastes more grain each year than Australia
produces, and more fruits and vegetables than the UK consumes.''
Blaming the lack of R&D for the crisis in the Indian agriculture
sector which has led to 200,000 suicides since 1997, the report
said, "While China pumps $3.5 billion into agricultural research -
Chinese farmers grew 6.2 metric tons of rice per hectare in 2008,
double India's output - India's spends a fraction of that.''
In another story from Dharampur Mushahar Toll in Bihar, the
national daily Globe and Mail reported Sunday that "the boom in
Bihar sounds more like a whimper.''
Bihar, which has the lowest literacy rate, the highest
child-mortality rate and the lowest life expectancy in India, has
become a synonym not for intractable despair, but for turnaround
under a new reformist government led by "a pot-bellied,
teetotalling socialist engineer named Nitish Kumar,'' the report
said.
But "to travel in Bihar - in the rural areas or in the capital,
Patna, where the streets are choked with garbage and the lights
flicker out every couple of hours - is to see both how the place
has changed, and how terribly far it has to go. And it is in this,
more than anything else, that Bihar is emblematic of India - of
its dark side of absolute poverty and exclusion, and how very
difficult a task it is to change them,'' the report said.
The paper said, "Half the children (in Dharampur Mushahar Toll)
are without clothes; a third of them have the deep hacking coughs
and crusted snot of chronic respiratory-tract infections. In the
newly built early-learning centre, a gaggle of three-year-olds
sits beneath one tattered poster of the English alphabet - not
that there is anyone around who can read it. Few people have any
food in their tiny houses; they buy what they can each day after
working on the land of higher-caste villagers.''
But giving credit to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who inherited a
"wretched mess" after "15 years of misrule by a theatrical thug
Lalu Prasad Yadav and his wife Rabri", the report said that under
him "the reign of the criminals (has) collapsed; now, in the
evenings, the city streets throng with shoppers and families out
for ice cream.''
Infrastructure construction is booming, school enrollments have
doubled and doctors and teachers show up for duty on time.
But "Mr (Nitish) Kumar, however good his intentions, cannot
leapfrog his state into the 21st century. He can drag it to 1950,
or 1970. But not to 2011. And there are pockets just like Bihar
all over India where this is true.'
(Gurmukh Singh
can be contacted at gurmukh.s@ians.in)
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