India's Hunger Crisis Might be Worse Than Covid-19

Nafisa watched her baby’s life drain away.

She and her husband struggled to make even 1 rupee (1 cent) a day from their tailoring business after India went into a Covid-19 lockdown in March. They often have nothing to eat. Nafisa was breast-feeding little Aaris, and with hardly any food for herself, she simply couldn’t produce enough milk. He grew weak, and his skin yellowed with jaundice. Hungry and in pain, he sobbed and howled. He died in his mother’s arms just a few weeks into the lockdown, at four months old.

It was an especially cruel tragedy because it happened in a country that boasts about having the world’s largest food-aid program. Government warehouses brim with more than 70 million metric tons of grains, or almost 15% of global stockpiles, and the nation’s wheat and rice harvests have surged to records. Still, like millions of other Indians, Nafisa has never gotten any of the subsidized food promised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration. Her 5-year-old son, Salman, doesn’t even bother asking for food anymore, because he knows there’s no point.

“Nobody is listening to us,” 24-year-old Nafisa, who goes by a single name, said from the Banda district in Uttar Pradesh state. Recounting how she applied in vain time and again for the ration card that would help feed her family, she broke down in tears.

“If we had the card, at least we could feed our child.”

Governments across the world have failed to prevent a hunger crisis that is reaching monumental proportions. Globally, as many as 132 million more people than previously projected by the United Nations could go hungry in 2020. The total increase for this year could be more than triple any this century, even at a time of ample food supplies, as the pandemic sharpens the world’s deep inequalities.

Covid-19 is also exposing India’s big divides, like access to quality health care and proper sanitation. And of course, there’s the basic question of who gets to eat, and who doesn’t. Even before the lockdowns, roughly three-quarters of the population (more than 1 billion people) couldn’t afford a healthy diet.

To meet the need, the government is required by law to provide as many as 5 kilograms (11 pounds) of rice, wheat and coarse grains at subsidized rates as low as 1 rupee per kilogram to anyone who needs it. The cheap staple foods are sold at so-called fair price shops, where buyers need a government-issued ration card to make a purchase at the give-away rates. India spends more than 1 trillion rupees ($13.6 billion) on the program.

But there are still tens of millions getting locked out of the assistance.

Bureaucratic difficulties were cited by the government’s think tank Niti Aayog as the single most-important reason blocking access to the food program. Raja Bhaiya, the secretary of aid group Vidya Dham Samiti which works in the Banda district, said some shopkeepers also direct grain that’s meant for the program for their own sales, at higher prices.

The biggest problem with the program, though, is that it’s woefully underfunded. More than 100 million people are being left out of the current budget, according to Jean Dreze, a visiting professor with Ranchi University in eastern India, who helped draft the national food law. The government is allotting its funds using 2011-2012 census data. Back then, the population was a little more than 1.2 billion. Now it’s grown to roughly 1.38 billion.

Siraj Hussain is a former chairman of state-run Food Corp. of India, the agency that oversees the food procurement program. He agrees about the problems with the old figures. The dated census data means that the actual number of those in need “is not known,” said Hussain, who’s now a visiting senior fellow at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations in New Delhi.

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