Relief that kills

LET us remember some forgotten words of our daily discourse. Food, defined as nutritious substance necessary to maintain life. Not only have we forgotten food, we have forgotten that it does not come out of plastic packets on supermarket shelves for most people. Rations. Wuz dat? A fixed official allowance of food in a time of shortage, something we have never experienced since the days onions disappeared and we collectively roared in anger. Starve, to suffer from lack of food, and ultimately die as a consequence. Certainly, the word does not exist in the Orissa chief minister’s dictionary and is otherwise generally used as a term of playful exaggeration: ‘‘I’m starving, let’s place our order fast!’’

Moneylender: A person who lends money as a business. He was the bad guy of early 20th century Bengali fiction and, although we may have forgotten his existence, he is not about to disappear. Today, he has kept up with the times. No longer does he demand the wife’s gold nose-stud as surety, the family ration card is good enough. Poverty line, generally taken to be a threshold, in terms of income, below which people can be considered to be ‘poor’ and the cause of much mathematics in the corridors of power. When mathematics replaces governance, people below the poverty line may disappear from official statistics but appear suddenly to die on TV screens and front pages. Buffer stocks: Originally meant as a cushion in times of scarcity, it has now come to be a buffer against angry farmers who won’t vote for you if you don’t buy their wheat and paddy. As a consequence, the food bags inside FCI godowns go through the roof, but not into people’s stomachs.

Kashipur has suddenly made these long-forgotten words the hottest around, with even Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik bestirring himself to reach Ground Zero at long last. He may, after this trip to Kashipur, finally realise that mango kernels are not a delicacy like bamboo shoots, as one of his party colleagues had argued on TV, but a starvation food, the last recourse of a desperate people to hold on to a flicker of life.

Perhaps it would be unfair to heap all the blame of the present tragedy on to Patnaik. The media was up to its old tricks even when his father was the chief minister and the great J.B. Patnaik had to defend himself against charges of allowing his people to starve. In a classic interview with Dhiren Bhagat in March 1987, J.B. painstakingly explained that ants are a ‘‘type of food popular in many areas, particularly Korapat’’. Not a staple food, of course, but ‘‘a type of delicacy’’ nevertheless. Ants then, mango kernels now, delicacies in western Orissa continue to grow apace. Korapat yesterday, Kashipur today, the ‘‘affected area’’ may alter but not the reality it represents.

Two major factors have laid western Orissa low. First was the systematic decimation of its natural resources and of the people who depended on them. A steady process of pauperisation caused by local communities losing control over two vital resources — forests and fertile land. Add to this, erratic monsoons — there is a saying in Oriya, jala bahule srustinasa, jala bihune, srustinasa (too much or too little water brings creation to an end) — and you have a complete picture of devastation. Many of the villages here look as if they are bombed out, with able-bodied people having migrated out for menial jobs in the cities, leaving behind the vulnerable — the very old or the very young — to survive as best they can.

Then there is the scandal of ‘‘relief’’, so badly administered that it only exacerbates the problem. How is it that all those funds and projects meant for drought relief have made such little difference on the ground? Well, as noted development journalist, P. Sainath, put it so succinctly: ‘‘Everybody loves a good drought’’. Everybody, but those who suffer it, that is. Sainath after studying the manner administrations respond to such calamities in poor areas of the country, stated that drought relief was one of the country’s biggest growth industries — to the extent that it is known locally as the teesra fasl, or third crop, although only the powerful harvest it.

It is not as if our administrators are unaware of these realities. While the ‘Mid-Term Appraisal of the Ninth Five Year Plan’ states that poverty has substantially declined in the eighties, it recognises the existence of major negative factors that are slowing the process. These include the fiscal crisis faced by state governments that results in their spending less on the social sector; a slowed down or less dispersed agricultural growth; a decline in ‘‘employment intensity’’ in the agricultural sector and the negligible expansion of the non-farm sector.

But what is most conspicuous is evidence that poverty alleviation programmes, run by the governments at the Centre and in the state, are almost dysfunctional. Take the Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP), started in all the blocks of the country as a major self-employment scheme for the rural poor in 1980. It could have, properly administered, prevented the scenes now being played out at Kashipur. But in the best traditions of governmental botch-ups, the IRDP — now named the Swarnjayanthi Gram Swarozgar Yojana — remains a poorly targeted effort benefitting the middlemen, with little participation of the people for whom it is meant. A study of how IRDP worked in Orissa’s Balasore district — quoted in the mid-term appraisal — revealed how party politics and monetary considerations influenced the selection of IRDP beneficiaries. In most cases, selection guidelines were not followed and the records were largely fudged.

The story is similar when it comes to the management of the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS). A study carried out on 2,250 households in Uttar Pradesh by Ravi Srivastava has revealed that TDPS hardly made a difference to the household budgets of the poorest — for instance, in UP, savings through it accounts for only 1.3-1.1 per cent of the cereal budgets of households in the two lowest units. In other words, TDPS is not reaching the people it is meant for and the foodgrain so earmarked ultimately finds its way into the black market. The fact that state governments do not lift their quotas due to poor administrative arrangements does not help of course. In any case, how can a system of targeted food distribution work if the majority of state governments, including Orissa, has not bothered to identify the number of people living Below the Poverty Line — something that was made evident in recent submissions before the Supreme Court?

So let us add another term to our newly furbished vocabulary: rotten mango kernels, or toxins ingested in the name of food. They symbolise the deep rot in the manner India responds to the needs of a third of its population.

Earlier Columns