There are several excellent passages in Mehul Srivastava’s article for Bloomberg’s Businessweek so I will pick them out by the related academic discipline:
1. “ It had been a year, at least, since Ghanshyam last ate meat, eight months since he was able to catch fish in the nearby river, and six months since he’d had an egg, he told me. Later I showed photos of the meals to Rachita Singh, a nutritionist at the Saket Max Hospital in New Delhi. She estimated they would provide about 1,700 to 1,800 calories a day. Such a diet, heavy in cereals and other carbohydrates, is what most rural Indians eat. In 2010, according to India’s statistics ministry, 64 percent of the calories consumed by rural Indians came from cereals, about 9 percent from oils and fats, and less than 5 percent each from sugar and pulses such as the lentils we ate. Fruit, vegetables, meat, eggs, and fish together made up about 2.5 percent. By all counts—overall calories or nutrients—it’s a poor diet.”
It also sounds like a diet that a slightly crazier First Lady, Mark Bittman or some other renowned researcher of obesity in an epidemiological or biochemical perspective wouldn’t mind forcing on a rich nation (Eat Food, Somewhat Nutritious, Mostly Not.) It should be said that there are populations like the Kitavans (etc) who also subsist on a diet that is nearly completely carbohydrate but they are doing so with yams and other tubers which have nearly all the micronutrients that cereal grains lack and often while trading with other populations for gathered seafood (like micronutrient-rich shellfish.)
2. “ As he grew into his teens and early adulthood, however, the Green Revolution took hold: The fields were sown with hybrid seeds and enriched with chemical fertilizers, enabling the country first to feed itself and later to sell its grain on the global markets”
Speaking about his father, the author narrates a history we should know well–the agricultural revolution fomented by hardier varietals of staple grains and the liberal use of fertilizers. In some respects, going by caloric intake, this revolution has run its course and no longer yields gains in marginal productivity though my personal theory is that eliminating problems in distribution (and the corruption implied) can keep the country self-sufficient for the near term.
3. ”In 2009 two economists, Angus Deaton, at Princeton University, and Jean Drèze, at the G.B. Pant Social Science Institute in Allahabad, just two hours from Auar, wrote a paper arguing that Indians were consuming fewer calories today than in the 1980s because they needed fewer calories. Poor Indians now had bicycles and got sick less often, they said, and that might solve the puzzle that has confounded economists studying Indian nutrition—falling calorie counts at a time of rising real incomes”
Though I can’t find the 60′s era data now, the author presents the figure of 62% of over a billion Indians who live in rural areas and are thus subject to the barbaric vicissitudes of the rural labor market–high temperature, low pay, and chronic illnesses like tuberculosis all made worse by rampant malnutrition.
4. ”My first day in the village, I was taken to the upper-caste basti to meet the village headman, a tall, broad-chested Brahmin named Vinod Upadhyay. I wanted him to know I’d be living in the village and asking questions. He offered me a plastic chair outside his two-story brick house, where a shiny motorcycle stood next to an electric water pump. A servant brought out tea and biscuits. After my first sip, I asked Upadhyay why he wasn’t joining me.
“When I eat with lower castes, it disagrees with my stomach,” he answered nonchalantly.”
Shocking but unsurprising article.
“To be fair, while India has struggled to improve nutrition for the entire country, it has largely managed to end death by starvation. But to cure India of hunger would require the nation to be cured of all else that ails it—corruption, bureaucracy, poverty, caste differences, the Malthusian nightmare of having more people than it can employ. In essence, it may be that Indians are still hungry because India is not yet a fully functional country. My father takes a darker view. “Nobody cares,” he says.”
I wonder why in an article that is so in-depth (and invokes Malthus) there is no discussion of population control (elite guilt?). The author’s family themselves had a large no of children in earlier generations. This is related to the poverty problem he describes, the reason poor people have a lot of children is because they do not know how many will survive and “make it.” As is clear from his article some of them “made it” and pulled the other brothers (and sisters) along.
In effect, “Poverty Causes Population Growth Causes Poverty.” http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn126manupured
Human nature being what it is the above “family values” strategy will fail many a time (mostly?). There are countless anecdotes where the eldest boy (it is always the boy) who had all the money available thrown at his education, grow up, escape poverty and…. disown his family. The blame is then affixed to the bride, usually who has been tortured to cough up a large dowry. The author alludes to it in the article, the wedding feast was a luxury that Ghanshyam could not afford but for the efforts of the bride side. Even the poor reserve the right to torture other poor.
The author mentions China but is silent on the one-child policy. The Chinese themselves are not shy in pointing out that this is a magic bullet. Less children with women freed up to work in the factories = larger income.
In India the elites would desperately want the poor to adopt a one-child policy (they themselves mostly do). But why should the poor listen? What if that one child does not turn out to be a success? They have the votes (the elites do not vote). Last time the govt attempted mass-scale castrations (on males), the voters scared the living daylights out of them. Family planning now emphasizes women getting tubes tied, the men dont seem to mind (they can marry again and have children if they wish).
The other points made are very valid (if well known). Corruption is a killer (Rajiv Gandhi’s famous estimate that only 15p/100p makes it to the target, 85% goes to the dalals). Caste based oppression is a killer.
The “grain rotting in Food Corp India godowns” is a real mystery. When the supreme court recently demanded answers the ministers almost choked in “how dare you make policy” anger. The mark of a non-functional state: 30% grains grown simply rot. The impact is to keep grain prices high and mimics the US where sometimes excess crop is burnt (perhaps India has unofficially adopted such policies). The goal is to please rich farmers (who can still dictate the vote count in the villages) not the poor.
Like Brazil, India will now start direct cash transfers to the poor. The goal is to cut out the middlemen and end corruption. While anything that improves the situation is to be applauded I have my doubts. Train ticketing is online yet promises to remove corruption is unfulfilled.
LBNTL caste based oppression needs to go. Dalit houses were burning (again) in Tamil Nadu yesterday. Supposedly dalit boys were teasing a middle-caste girl. Over the weekend the paras were deployed in Haryana because dalit sikhs were fighting jat sikhs. If Indians forget the simple principle “the people you keep down will also keep you down” then they deserve all the mockery the world throws at them.
regards
“The “grain rotting in Food
Corp India godowns” is a
real mystery.”
its no mystery at all. If you take all the Vandana Shivas, Arundhati Roys, Prakash Karats and closet socialists in the Congress, give them PR in US/Canada + some pocket money to get the heck out of poor farmer’s lives.. there won’t be any rotting crops.