Wrong debate on Global Hunger Index: High time the dubious role of 'eminent' socialists is exposed

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) places India at a very low ranking in meeting one of the important aspects of people’s lives – a reasonably full stomach. An empty stomach has many problems. One cannot work sufficiently hard to earn a good living. Children cannot concentrate on studies and hence fall back on learning scores. Ability to combat disease is weakened. And spirituality becomes a risk – one cannot sing a bhajan on an empty stomach.

There are some who have questioned the methodology of the Index, and to effectively say that things are not as bad as it is made out to be. There is merit in this argument, but we should all admit that things are not as good as one would like it to be. And work out solutions to the problem so that no person has to go to sleep on an empty stomach. While much progress has been made since 1947, there is still a long way to go.

At least we have not had the famines that were witnessed in the British colonial period. Prof Amartya Sen is right that a reasonably vibrant democracy played an important role here. The news about the tragedy could not be suppressed, and the government and society would immediately react to deal with the situation.

We also need to understand why after 75 years of Independence we have not been able to tackle the problem. Countries which started in 1947 at positions below India, have been able to fulfil the need for food of their people a long time ago.

So what did India do wrong?

Swaminathan Aiyar in a paper titled; Socialism Kills - The Human Cost of Delayed Economic Reform in India (Cato Institute, October 2009) writes:

“This paper seeks to estimate the number of “missing children,” “missing literates,” and “missing non-poor” resulting from delayed reform, slower economic growth, and hence, slower improvement of social indicators. It finds that with earlier reform, 14.5 million more children would have survived, 261 million more Indians would have become literate, and 109 million more people would have risen above the poverty line. The delay in economic reform represents an enormous social tragedy. It drives home the point that India’s socialist era, which claimed it would deliver growth with social justice, delivered neither.”

But, socialism is not an amorphous body that went and whispered in the ears of the people in the system that were tasked to work out and implement economic and social programmes what they should be doing. It is the people who used the supposed principles of socialism to formulate and implement the policies. And these people worked in institutes that were funded by the taxes of the people, and hence it is perfectly legitimate to hold them responsible for the failure of the policies.

‘Socialists Kill’

I have not come across any of these people do a mea culpa and explain to the people what the mistakes they made and why. Instead, they seem to be saying “I have always been in favour of reforms”. The correct title of Aiyar’s paper should have been “Socialists Kill”.

One of the important elements in dealing with hunger is the provision of sufficient water for agriculture, and good quality water for domestic consumption. An imperative instrument to achieve this is to tap the water available in rivers by building dams. Such projects have often encountered serious obstacles in their completion.

The classic case is that of the Sardar Sarovar project on the Narmada river in Gujarat. Aiyar had made a documentary, titled Dammed but not damned, evaluating the effects on those who were displaced due to submergence of their lands. And he found that every objection raised by those who call themselves environmental activists have been seriously flawed. This documentary was broadcast by Disney-Hotstar in March 2021.

Around that time India Today had made a documentary, unrelated to Aiyar’s documentary, on how much benefits water starved areas of Saurashtra and Kutch were able to obtain when the waters of Narmada reached them. The Narmada water has also enabled Gujarat to tackle a major problem in drinking water with high content of fluorosis in Ahmedabad and surrounding areas. Mixing the Narmada water with the local sources effectively deal with it.

Many other development projects which could have provided job opportunities, and hence the ability to feed good and nutritious food for the families, were also either abandoned or seriously delayed. In one such case, in January 2014, the BBC reported: “Few Dongria Kondh - which means hill dwellers - live much beyond 40, far below the Indian average. One man we talk to says all but one of his five children died young.” The correspondent seemed not to be overly concerned about the miserable life because the thrust of his article was that the objection to the project was justified.

The serious delays in the Sardar Sarovar project is another example of what Aiyar talked about in his 2009 paper. However, it does not seem to have received any comment, even to say that it is wrong. The documentary proving the Narmada Bachao Andolan activists wrong does seem to have received some traction.

Recently, Aiyar apologised for believing in the arguments made by NBA, and asked its leaders to apologise also. None of them did – in fact they dismissed Aiyar’s documentary, and still maintain that the project is a failure and not achieved the objectives it set out to do.

The effect of what the socialists, in the guise of economic planning, did was that the country achieved a growth rate of about 4% per annum in the first forty years of our independence.

When the reform process started, the growth rate over the next thirty years was an average of 6% per annum. Had the respective rates been 6% and 7% per annum, India would have been three times the economy that we are today – that is $9 trillion of GDP.

Our absolute expenditure on all the necessary state funded development programmes relating to health, education, housing, infrastructure, etc., would also have been three times even if the percentage of GDP remained what it is today.

And then we can imagine where we would have been in the Global Hunger Index.

Way forward

The ones who are responsible for the state of affairs today need to be named and shamed, starting from 1947 onwards. And, importantly, they should no longer hold any position in the society which gives them respect, let alone any money. They have to disappear (metaphorically) from society, because they have not even thought of doing any mea culpa for the serious mistakes they did.

The solutions to our problems are really not complicated. On 16 October, 2022, we heard of the sad news of the passing away of Dr Dilip Mahalanabis who invented the Oral Rehydration Solution to treat the massive problem faced by the children in the refugee camps in West Bengal at the time of the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. This treatment has saved the lives of 60 million people all over the world, including a very large number of children. He has not received any national awards, except the ones specific to his profession. Whereas many of the socialists who were responsible for the death of 14 million children in India have had all sorts of Padma awards and other national awards even in their own profession.

Many of the socialists today are trying to present India and its people in a negative light. Not only do they not want to be part of the solutions to our problems, they in fact try to impede formulating solutions or putting them in practice. Without them India would have quietly dealt with the problems relating to hunger and much more.

The author is the Vice President of Vishwa Hindu Parishad, India. Views expressed are personal.

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