But the real issue isn't onions. It is the increasing inaccessibility of vegetables and fruit in a perennially malnourished nation. So, you can't tell people who for generations have found sustenance from roti, sattoo and pyaaz (in West Bengal, Orissa and Assam, the variation is rice soaked in water and fermentedovernight, with plain besan bhajis and pyaaz) to abstain from onions to teach some obese hoarder a lesson! How can you ask anyone to give up the most important component of one's diet? Soon, someone will tell us to stay off carrots (Rs 40 a kilo), off cauliflowers (also Rs 40), off tomatoes (Rs 30), off garlic (Rs 60) -- those very vegetables, in other words, that the World Health Organisation (WHO) tells us to eat in generous quantities daily.

Last year, the World Cancer Research Fund and the Amer-ican Institute for Can-cer Research woke up the world by putting their stamp of approval on the dramatic finding, first reported to the US Congress by Ric-hard Doll and Richard Peto in 1981, that just a regular intake of 400-800 gm of fresh fruit (especially apples, selling for Rs 50 in my neighbourhood baz-aar) and vegetables can reduce our chances of getting cancer by a good 20 per cent. Ideally, according to the report titled Food, Nutrition and The Prevention of Cancer: A Global Perspective, if you want tokeep cancer at bay (and we know that cancer prevention has positive spin-offs for high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease), you've got to help yourself to five or more servings of a variety of vegetables and fruit, all year round, as well as 600-800 gm, or more than seven portions a day, of grains, pulses, roots, tubers and plantains. Veggies, in fact, can even neutralise the contribution of smoking to lung cancer (or chewing tobacco and betel nut to oral cancers). The lung cancer risk dips by 50 per cent when the at-risk individual's intake of vegetables goes up from 150 gm to 400 gm a day; similarly, increase the amount of greens you have every day from 150 gm to 350 gm, and see your stomach cancer risk slide by 60 per cent.

This is the ideal and, as always, we are way behind it. Surveys by the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau and the Indian Council of Medical Research tell a very grim tale. The average daily consumption of vegetables and fresh fruit in rural India was a pathetic 77 gm in1993-94 (the year for which the latest data are available), down from 80 gm in 1975-79. Translate these figures into policy directions and you have a disaster waiting to happen. The Majority Indian's intake of vegetables and fruit is less than 20 per cent of the level recommended by experts. Not that the Urban Indian is significantly better off, what with the daily intake ranging from 77 gm in slums to 258 gm in high-income families.

So, we are, as in many other departments, a living, breathing paradox -- we are primarily a vegetarian nation (our vegetarianism as much culturally driven as poverty-induced), but our average daily intake of fresh fruit and greens is way below what is for our own good. And by demonstrating its utter administrative incompetence, our rag-tag ruling coalition, which is yet to demonstrate any commitment to the nation's health, is denying us our right to nutrition, the basic component of the right to life. By urging us to abstain from onions, therefore, our Enlightened Ones are onlydiverting people's attention from our "able" government's inability to be proactive, to think long-term on real issues. After all, the onion crisis didn't happen overnight. And isn't it true -- and the Government of India conceded as much at the FAO/WHO International Conference on Nutrition in 1992 -- that the food and agriculture policy that made India self-reliant in food grains, paid little attention to whole grains, pulses, oilseeds and vegetables, causing their availability to decline, and their prices to rise?

Abstaining from food may be a pleasant diversion for the overnourished elite, but for the malnourished majority it's like inviting more trouble. If there's got to be a people's movement, it must be directed against a government that has failed -- failed even to take a second look at the National Nutrition Policy, adopted in 1993, which makes a strong case for a national programme to step up the production of fruit and vegetables, for a national agriculture policy that takes into accountnutritional goals. That brings me back to my favourite line -- the nation's health isn't the concern only of health professionals or policy-makers. Health is a national concern, and it better be, for, as I have argued earlier, of the assets needed to grow out of poverty, good health ranks as high as education. So, instead of asking people to abstain from onions, Delhi's Enlightened Ones should ask their Chief Minister to keep her word and provide onions at Rs 5 a kilo. Broken promises, after all, don't make for good nutrition.