INDIA

Have food, will starve

"[C]lose to 50 million tonnes of grain are lying idle in public godowns in Rajasthan and across the country. There is so much grain in the Government's reserves that the Respondent no. 2, the Food Corporation of India has run out of storage space. In some cases, there is barely a distance of 75 kilometers between the location of these godowns and the places where starvation is rampant, people are malnourished, and cattle are dying."

-Writ petition filed in the Supreme Court of India by the People's Union for Civil Liberties, regarding starvations deaths in the State of Rajasthan in 2001. Government estimates placed the percentage of villages affected by the third consecutive year of drought in Rajasthan at 73.6%.

THE right to food is elaborated in General Comment No. 12 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as follows: “The right to adequate food is realised when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement.”

This right creates an obligation on Governments to assure that "each and every human being on this planet shall be free from hunger".  States are obligated to protect, respect, and fulfil the right to food. As explained in the most recent report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to food (E/CN.4/2003/54), the obligation to respect means that States must not violate the right to food (e.g. evict people from their land, destroy crops). The obligation to protect means that States must protect their citizens against violations by other actors (e.g. by instituting regulations on food safety).

The third obligation to fulfil the right to food means that States must first facilitate the right to food by providing an enabling environment for people to feed themselves (e.g. engage in land reform, stimulate employment), and secondly the State must be the provider of last resort in cases where people cannot feed themselves for reasons beyond their control (e.g. social safety net programmes, food stamps, food in prison).

These obligations are an elaboration of Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR). Furthermore, General Comment No. 3 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights concludes that these obligations are not precluded by the "progressive realisation" of economic, social and cultural rights. General Comment No. 3 therefore outlines minimum obligations that states must meet immediately for correct implementation of the right to food as provided for in the CESCR: obligation of non-discrimination, obligation to provide basic minimum substance, and obligation to respect. 

The Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that India accounts for over 400 million poor and hungry people. Over the past decade, several events have highlighted the Indian government's complacent attitude towards implementing the obligations outlined in General Comment No. 12, General Comment No. 3, the CESCR, and numerous other guidelines provided by United Nations human rights mechanisms.

The actions of the Indian government, or more specifically the lack thereof, run contrary to the Constitution of India. Article 21 of the Constitution makes it mandatory for the State to ensure the right to life of the citizens, which includes the right to live with dignity. Article 47, a Directive Principle of State Policy provides "the duty of the State to raise the level of nutrition and the standard of living and to improve public health".

Now, for the first time, the struggle for the right to food has reached the Supreme Court of India. In May 2001, the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) began a public interest litigation case regarding the right to food by filing a writ petition with the Supreme Court. One of the petition's arguments was that several federal institutions and local state government should be held responsible for mass malnutrition among the people living in the states concerned. In one of its interim orders relating to the case, the Supreme Court affirmed that where people are unable to feed themselves adequately, governments have an obligation to provide for them, ensuring, at the very least, that they are not exposed to malnourishment, starvation and other related problems.

On 28 November 2001, after four hearings, the Supreme Court passed an interim order that provides for the conversion of eight food security schemes into entitlements (rights) for the poor. These include the Antyodaya Anna Yojna (food for the poorest of the poor scheme), the National Old-Age Pension Scheme, the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme, the National Mid-day Meals Programme (NMMP), the Annapurna scheme (food scheme for those above the age of 65) and several employment schemes providing food for work, which would in the final instance, be an iron clad guarantee of food security.

Of the eight schemes, the most significant is the order directing all state governments to provide cooked mid-day meals in all government schools in at least half of each state's districts by January 2002, which was later extended to 28 May 2002.

In response to the PUCL petition, the governments of the states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab, Haryana, Karnataka, Orissa, Meghalaya and Manipur claimed before the Supreme Court that implementation of the Central and state schemes was complete, that there were no starvation deaths and no destitutes in their respective states. They also claimed that sufficient food was being supplied through the Public Distribution System (PDS) and that anyone who needed food but was unable to work for it was being given relief. On further orders by the Supreme Court, the state governments prepared a compliance report vis-a-vis nine Central government schemes.             Despite the romantic optimism that states expressed in their statements before the Supreme Court, their compliance reports made it clear that the state of food security in India is worrisome.

Scepticism increases when one scrutinises the records of schemes that were cited as providers of food to the poor. The Public Distribution System (PDS) is a food subsidy programme that explicitly targets the poor. The program has recently been renamed the 'Targeted Public Distribution System' (TPDS), but results have still been extremely limited. The performance of fair price shops, where they exist, remains dismal in some states.

In Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Rajasthan, one often finds bogus ration cards, poor quality grains, short weighing of food, and rates equivalent to or marginally below the market rates. According to a National Sample Survey data conducted by the World Bank in 2002, 10 percent of poor households in Uttar Pradesh do not have any ration card at all. Among other things, it is clear that a review of the Below Poverty Line (BPL) list is long overdue.

It is equally clear that most states have not complied with the Supreme Court's order regarding the introduction of cooked mid-day meals in primary schools. The state of Uttar Pradesh is a case in point. In many cases, instead of providing children with cooked meals the students are asked to collect foodgrain from a local ration shop. The students are given a chit and asked to queue up at the ration shop. Thus they are given neither "cooked" food nor a "meal", and there is no guarantee that they will eventually get the meager amount of food they have ostensibly been provided with.

According to the second report of the appointed Commissioner of the Supreme Court on the right to food, submitted on 3 March 2003, with the exception of Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh, several state governments (in particular Bihar, Jharkhand, Mizoram and Assam) have failed to implement the order on cooked meals. "Unaffordability", "unimplementability", waste of teachers' time, disruption of school activities and hygiene problems have been cited to justify the violation of the order.

Lastly, large amounts of food stocks might suggest that large-scale food-for-work programmes should be successful in India. However, a shortage of funds in state government coffers have prevented effective implementation.

Whether due to lack of funds from the central government, or lack of initiative in obtaining funds on the part of the state government, the implementation of the food-for-work programmes is extremely tardy even when the Centre provides free cereals.

In Jharkhand, for example, employment programmes are non-existent in Manatu block in Palamau district - even though Manatu has been declared, "drought affected" since November 2001.                            

The lack of initiative on the part of the Indian government in meeting its obligation to "fulfill" the right to food through enablement and being a provider of last resort is a callous contradiction to the CESCR, to which India has been a party since 1979. Despite the recent rulings of the Supreme Court, the justiciability of the right to food in India continues to be hampered by the fact that state governments seem more inclined to direct their energies towards denying of starvation deaths than towards implementing workable solutions.

This dearth of commitment is ominous for those who lack adequate food or the means for its procurement. 

Plenty of hunger...

IN March 2002, the Supreme Court asked all States and Union Territories to respond to an application seeking the framing of wage employment schemes such as the Sampoorna Gramin Rojgar Yojna or the SGRY (Comprehensive Village Employment Programme) that ensure the right to work in rural areas. The Supreme Court also spelt out detailed directions on the implementation of various other schemes, and appointed two former civil servants as "commissioners" who would look into any persisting grievances that were not amenable to established procedures of redress. On 8 May 2002, the Supreme Court agreed on a system of monitoring. The Bench also added that the states are to provide a funds utilisation certificate before the money is released for their use. Returning to this order after a lapse of some months, the Supreme Court in November 2002 laid out clear procedures of accountability. Every State was required to publicise the details of the court's order in gram panchayat offices (local village level government), school buildings and fair price shops within eight weeks. However the court order, like the food assistance system, has remained paralysed in several states.

In October 2002 there were reports of large-scale 'starvation deaths' in Rajasthan, stating that 60 people died as a result of severe malnutrition. In November 2002, at least 22 tribals, mostly children, died of severe malnutrition in Ganj Basoda block in Vidisha district in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. In December 2002, there were reports of large scale starvation deaths in the Musahaar community in East Champaran District in Bihar. In January 2003 a number of starvation deaths were reported in the Cauvery Delta region in Thanjavur district in Tamil Nadu.