AFTER nearly 15 straight months of double-digit food inflation, the government announced that food inflation had dipped to 9.67 per cent. That’s small consolation for most Indians, particularly the poor, who have seen a relentless assault on their food budgets that has resulted in essential items being dropped from the menu, giving rise to a whole new enforced “austerity diet”.
Since no systematic study has been done yet on changes in food habits since the beginning of the commodity price spiral in late 2008, ToI spoke to families across various cities and heard, first-hand, of the distress diversification they are being forced to undertake.
It was found that families are eating smaller quantities or less often than before. Saraswathi, a coconut-seller in Chennai, says that it has been six months since she ate three meals in a day. Dal and milk are off the tables of the urban poor across the country. In Mumbai, Shakuntala Chakrabarty, a domestic worker, has had to cut moong dal out of her family’s menu while in Guwahati, peanut-seller Ram Vilas Lohar hasn’t been able to afford masoor dal after its price touched Rs 96 per kg.
In addition, green vegetables and tomatoes are also increasingly unaffordable in cities. In Chennai, Valli, a domestic help, is forced to buy overripe tomatoes rejected by supermarkets, while in Mumbai, Shanti Yadav frets over not being able to give her children carrots and beans any more. Fruits are virtually a luxury. In Faridkot’s Sanjay Nagar locality, Swaran Singh has since his childhood associated summers with mangoes, but his children have never tasted the fruit. In Chennai, Nagamma, a sweeper in a corporation school, can only afford bananas nowadays.
In a country with a large population of vegetarians, the absence of milk and dal from the daily diet means that the poor in India, the bulk of them employed in manual labour, are simply not getting adequate proteins. Non-vegetarian families, like the Prasads on the eastern fringes of Kolkata, are being forced to reduce their meat intake and eat the less nutritious parts of chicken and mutton.
Substitutes vary from region to region. Families are reporting that they dilute their food, whether it is kanji (rice gruel) in place of idlis and dosas (that require more rice batter) in Tamil Nadu or watery dal that is made to last six times longer in Madhya Pradesh.
Across the country, poor families also reported difficulties in accessing subsidised grain from public distribution system outlets – many also complained of poor quality of grain – strengthening the arguments for greater supervision and wider access of PDS. In states with a better functioning PDS, such as Tamil Nadu where the scheme is universal, poor families, like that of Valli in Chennai, said subsidised grain had served as a buffer against starvation.
Most worryingly, hapless parents across the country, including those in agriculturally prosperous Punjab, said that they were giving their children more nutritious food five-six years ago than what they are able to afford now. In Ahmedabad’s Gokuldham settlement, Mona Rajput has had to make the painful decision to stop giving milk to her four-year-old son so that her five-month-old infant can get some. In a country in which half of all children are already malnourished, the seemingly unstoppable rise in food prices is threatening to sow the seeds of a dangerously malnourished future generation.
These retrograde steps have demoralised people who had hoped for a better life. In Bhopal’s Mata Mandir area, Babybai Girmiye, a domestic worker, said, “As a child, I saw my father going to work in the fields with a couple of rotis, a piece of onion and salt tied in a piece of cloth. That was his lunch. I married a man working in the city hoping for a better life and a little more food. But over the past six months, I can see those days of roti and salt coming back to my life.”
Neither the international commodity price spiral of 2007, nor the failed 2009 monsoon can explain away the food price assault. While food prices the world over escalated in 2007 and 2008, they stabilised in 2009. But in India, the spiral continued. Food prices in the country began to rise in late 2008, much before the monsoon forecasts of 2009, and have continued to squeeze family budgets well into 2010’s much better monsoon.
(Courtesy: ToI)
(http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
