Dispossessed: Stories from India's Margins

INTRODUCTION

My colleague Ankita Aggarwal and I visited hunger-prone villages in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand from September to November 2011 to chronicle government responses to the starvation deaths that had occurred between 2005 and 2010.

A decade before our travels, the Supreme Court had recognized poor people’s ‘rights to food’ through access to food, nutrition, pension and public works programmes. In the summer of 2001, numerous starvation deaths had occurred in Rajasthan at a time when public storehouses held over 50 million tonnes of food grains. Public food and nutrition programmes were defunct.

The People’s Union on Civil Liberties filed a public interest litigation on behalf of the poor that year, asking the courts to recognize the duty of officials to deliver social services as a Constitutionally backed human right of the disadvantaged. ‘Article 21 of the Indian Constitution protects for every citizen a right to live with human dignity,’ they wrote. ‘Would the very existence of life for those families which are below the poverty line not come under danger for want of appropriate schemes and implementation…to provide aid to such families?’

The orders were historic as they interpreted the right of access to eight social protection programmes as inherent to the Constitutional right to life (Article 21), transforming the administrative duty to implement social security programmes into a Constitutionally recognized legal mandate.

In 2009, the UPA government promised to pass a National Food Security Bill upon re-election. Policymakers could no longer ignore the paradox blighting India’s claim as an emerging nation. Four decades of food production surpluses and a high long-term growth rate—just over 8 per cent since the 1991 economic reforms—existed alongside the country’s shameful distinction of being home to more than 200 million hungry and malnourished people.

The National Food Security Bill was therefore conceived as a human-rights law meant to ensure people’s access to food vis-à-vis the social protection system. Passed in September 2013, it assures the right of 67 per cent of Indians—about 820 million people—to buy highly subsidized grains from the public distribution system (PDS), as well as other entitlements for vulnerable people, such as maternity benefits for pregnant women and lactating mothers, nutrition services for children under six years old at local anganwadi centres and free mid-day meals for students at government schools. This figure represents 75 per cent of India’s rural and 50 per cent of its urban population. Poorer states have to provide access to the PDS’s wheat, rice and coarse grains to a greater percentage of their population, above the national 67 per cent cut-off. Bihar, for example, has to ensure that 86 per cent of its rural population benefits from the law.

The central government had given states an October 2014 deadline to implement the Act. Only eleven states, including Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, had begun to identify beneficiaries and distribute ration cards by then. The central government has since extended the deadline three times.

According to an April 2016 audit conducted by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), eighteen states had enacted the law by March 2015. Yet, only 51 per cent of the people in those states had been identified by officials.

Implementation of the Act has been slow, in part because states are left to devise their own methods to identify the two kinds of beneficiaries entitled to food and nutrition programmes. The first are ‘priority’ candidates, eligible to buy 5 kilogrammes of grains a month, paying Rs 3 per kilogramme of rice, Rs 2 for wheat and Rs 1 for millets. The second, ‘Antyodaya’ candidates, are considered to be the most vulnerable of poor people, such as the elderly or infirm. They are entitled to 35 kilogrammes of grain at subsidized prices. The central government had initially directed states to create their lists of beneficiaries based on the Socio-economic Caste Survey, but did not make the survey’s data public by the time the Act was passed.

Critics have also identified policy and budget decisions by the central government that threaten to curtail the impact of the law. Biraj Patnaik, principle advisor to the Commissioners of the Supreme Court on the 2001 right to food case, pointed out two moves that he believes violate the law’s provisions and those of previous court orders establishing access to social programmes. For one, budgets for nutrition services under the law were slashed by 50 per cent and maternity entitlements by about 30 per cent. Secondly, a March 2015 order issued by the Department of Food and Public Distribution (DFPD) directed states to eventually phase out the identification of the most vulnerable Antyodaya cardholders. In 2015, Patnaik reported in The Hindu that the DFPD directed officials ‘not to add any new household to this category if any household drops out due to an improvement in social and economic status, death, etc.’

Some field surveys, however, show signs of progress. In their August 2015 report in the Economic & Political Weekly, ‘Bihar on the Move,’ Jean Dreze, Reetika Khera and Jessica Pudussery reported that their 2014 survey in four rural districts of Bihar—Banka, Gaya, Purnea and Sitamarhi—showed that 78 per cent of of 997 families had correct ration cards and, in the previous two months, they had received 69 per cent and 79 per cent of their grains entitlements, respectively. This was a vast improvement compared to Bihar’s performance in the previous decade. They found that beneficiaries in Bihar received only 10 to 15 per cent of their grains entitlements during the 2000s.

Findings from 2011 also showed improvement in Bihar. That year, people were able to buy 76 per cent of their entitled allotment of grains.

In 2014, field researchers reported that ‘in earlier surveys households complained they had been excluded from the Below Poverty Line list’ and ‘with expanded PDS coverage under NFSA, that problem had been largely resolved.’ But Gaya district, where stories in this book take place, showed no signs of improvement during their survey. It was ‘the worst by a large margin as far as the PDS is concerned. In some villages, the NFSA did not seem to have had any impact at all.’

Despite national debates on the need for rights-based approaches to tackling hunger, not much was said publicly about how starvation response should be instituted in food legislation. Debates did emerge on other critical areas of food security: whether to reform food procurement and delivery systems; whether to reform public food distribution or scrap it for cash transfers; whether and how poverty lines should be revised to properly identify the poor to provide them access to social programmes; and the extent to which related deprivations, like malnutrition and the lack of clean drinking water and sanitation, should be included in food policy and legislation.

In the draft bill of 2011, the government had incorporated a version of the National Advisory Council’s recommendation defining starvation as prolonged deprivation of food that threatens the survival of a person. By the time the bill was passed in September 2013, the term was removed from the definitions section and from cohering sections, such as Rights of Persons Living in Starvation, which outlined systems of redressal, relief measures, methods of identification and investigation of starvation and starvation deaths.

We had set out for the field to ask how officials respond to incidents of starvation deaths. We quickly realized that the central questions were: who were these people who starved to death and how did they actually live? We visited villages segregated by caste. Tribal and Dalit people lived in destitution without adequate food, clean water, roads and proper shelter. There were also few to no nearby schools and hospitals. In conversations with people who had lost loved ones to hunger, we heard that their family members had died after enduring long periods of low food intake: a daily meal of rice or roti with salt, and sometimes local flora that grew in the village. The general pattern of demise went something like this: an economic shock—from the lack of work or the inability to access health care during an emergency—precipitated days of struggle without food.

The role social protection programmes can play in the lives of poor people was apparent. In each case, families were denied consistent access to the food, nutrition, public works and pension programmes intended for them. Diseases such as tuberculosis debilitated adults of working age, while most children, particularly infants, were visibly malnourished.

‘True peace,’ Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, ‘is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.’ In these villages, the silence we often encountered was not the quietude of peace. It was evidence of the injustice of death-inducing poverty. That is what these stories are about.

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Note: Versions of the chapters that detail our experiences in the villages of Banwara, Heta, Hindiyankalan, Manan Bhiga and Manjhladhi were first published in The Wall Street Journal’s India Real Time Blog as part of a six-part series called ‘Starving in India’ in April 2012 (http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/tag/starving-in-india/).

JALHI BONGIA, BIHAR

September and November 2011

Naresh Mandal (21, Male), Failu Bhuiya (25, Male), Vifiya Devi (60, Female), Heera Lal (32, Male), Bharti aka Aarti Kumari (5, Female), Riki aka Rinku Kumari (3, Female), Danesh Kumar (4, Male), Gulab Kumari (13, Male), Sonya Kumari (12, Female), Kalvati Kumari (12, Female), Jitendra Kumar (5, Male), Baldev Kumar (9, Male), Rakesh Kumar (8, Male), Dulari Kumari (8, Female), Sugwa Kumari (1, Female), Rajmanti Kumari (2, Female)

We had stopped visiting the villages for fieldwork in November 2011. Through April 2012, we were compiling our findings and writing about them. But something happened in May. I had to stop. I was thinking of death too much. The facts held up, but I felt like I was in a room with four walls that were about to smash together.

By October 2012, I was in Bihar again, in the villages of a district called Muzaffarpur. I was there to learn about other forms of human destruction, so when I learned that a yatra protesting the scaling back of provisions in the proposed National Food Security Bill was stopping in Muzaffarpur en route to Patna, I decided to go.

There were about 200 people gathered in a field. Rupesh was standing on the stage with a hand on the microphone like a rapper. Rupesh is the State Advisor to the Supreme Court Commissioner’s Office on the Right to Food. ‘Every day you read about starvation deaths in the newspapers,’ he was saying. ‘In Gaya there is a village called Jalhi Bongia. The Bhuiyas of this village are landless and to get their daily bread they have to migrate to cities in other states like Rajasthan to work in brick kilns and stone-crushing sites. For years now they have been coming back with silicosis or tuberculosis’. Jalhi Bongia is a village in the Mohanpur block of Bihar’s Gaya district; it had the first starvation deaths that we learned about.

We had met Rupesh in the basement of his office in Patna’s Panchwathi Nagar section one rainy Saturday morning. He was warm, yet intense, sometimes leaning forward while he spoke, both elbows on the table, hands together, or leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head. The day we met, he was wearing a white v-neck t-shirt, glasses, a thick head of white hair and a beard; this youthful, boyish face. We sat on metal chairs at a long, rectangular, water-stained wood table which left little walking space in the room. His colleague, Sanjay, a thin man in his fifties with dark prescription sunglasses, joined us. Sanjay was a Champaran-born farmer turned social activist and since he is fluent in English, he writes or translates many of the primary materials that came out of the fieldwork conducted by the office.

The way Rupesh told it, I knew he had told it many times. In the drought of August 2005, the people of Jalhi had no farm work and the ration shop, angwanwadi centre and public works programme were all closed. It had been like this for years. Members of the village’s Bhuiya community were leaving Jalhi in lean seasons to work in the brick kilns, coal mines or glass and plywood factories in other parts of Bihar, or in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Orissa, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, to avoid hunger. The Bhuiyas are a Dalit caste—untouchables outside the Hindu caste hierarchy—that have lived in extreme poverty in Bihar for generations due, in part, to long-held cultural practices of discrimination that prevent Dalits from accessing resources reserved for higher castes—namely land, education and jobs. In 2007, the state government identified the Bhuiyas and nineteen other Dalit communities for special housing, water, food and education programmes, intended to improve their lives and redress historical wrongs. Some Bhuiya families in Jalhi Bongia owned land. But the quality was poor and it wasn’t much: about 2 to 4 dishmil, a square plot of dirt the size of a home garden. There are no irrigation facilities or water harvesting sources to protect farms in times of drought. For generations, the village’s lower-caste Bhuiya and Ravidas families had worked on the nearby farms owned by landed Yadav farmers.

But that year, villagers who did not migrate to other states could not find farm work because the crops had failed. None of the Bhuiya villagers owned a ration card to buy wheat and rice from the local grain shop. Villagers who did—mostly Ravidas families—were not receiving their monthly installments. Bhuiya children were suffering because the anganwadi centre was not providing cooked meals, grain supplements and health services to the village.

Each of the Bhuiya families suffered a string of hunger-struck sleepless nights. One night, a few adult Bhuiyas weighed the options: find whatever food available in any way possible, or succumb. The community lives in a cramped hamlet in a row of mud-and-wood huts tightly wedged together. There is a dirt road 7 kilometres off the National Highway that leads into the village, through hamlets segregated by caste. On the other side of the road that lines their huts is a stretch of scorched fields bordered by thickets of wild weeds. Behind the thickets are hills and forest where Bhuiya men, women and children go to collect wood to sell in the markets when local work dries up. Days before, villagers had buried one of their goats in a patch of dirt between the thickets and the hills. Four adults walked into the weeds that night and performed the sacrament. They dug up the goat, carried the carcass into the hamlet. Village men and women cooked and ate it. The next morning, they fell sick with diarrhea. Sixteen people died within days of each other. Twelve were children.

Local and national newspapers reported the deaths. When Rupesh got word, he sent a team to conduct the first of a string of investigations into reported starvation deaths in the area. ‘The hope was to direct the state government’s attention to the plight of those suffering drastic conditions of hunger,’ he said. His team visited Jalhi and surveyed the performance of the social protection programmes deemed rights by the Supreme Court, the condition of child malnutrition and the availability of work. He found that none of the victims’ families had ration cards, the anganwadi centres and the mid-day meal programmes were defunct, and no one had received employment from the public works programme.

Rupesh sent the report to district and state government officials in late 2005. He said he received no response. Reports in Hindi and English newspapers said that the people of Jalhi resorted to eating the dead goat because they were starving, which moved government officials to issue statements on the cause of the tragedy.

A joint investigation team of government officials and NGO members visited the village that September. The District Development Commissioner (DDC) on that team filed a report to then-District Magistrate, Sandip Paundrik. Officials reported that villagers had died of diarrhea. They did not mention the status of food and work programmes or the lack of public infrastructure, like a working hand pump for drinking water. Mr Paundrik told the Times of India in September 2005 that ‘the report that the DDC submitted states that no death occurred due to hunger and all the deaths reported were due to diarrhea.’ The article also stated that Mr Paundrik dispatched the civil surgeon and a medical team twice to ‘affected villages’ and that both teams reported that ‘no further deaths occurred.’

A researcher on Rupesh’s team walked into the room with a stack of reports and placed them on the table while he talked. Rupesh handed us a copy of the report his team had recently conducted and sent to the Chief Secretary of Bihar. The study listed about 100 investigations into reported starvation deaths in Bihar from 2006 to 2009. It covered six districts, including Begusarai, Muzaffarpur, Gaya, Patna, Nalanda and Jahanabad. The Chief Secretary of Bihar is the head bureaucrat identified by the Supreme Court as responsible for the implementation of all right-to-food programmes in the state. This official is charged with ensuring that the families of victims of starvation-related deaths are provided immediate access to food, work and nutrition programmes. The Chief Secretary of Bihar at the time of this field research did not respond to phone or fax requests to be interviewed for this book. The inaction that followed the Jalhi tragedy, Rupesh said, was the catalyst for the statewide survey.

‘Over the next four years numerous other deaths [in Bihar] were reported in the media,’ he told us. ‘The state had been hit by three consecutive drought years from 2006 to 2009, which led to the deaths of many poor people.’ The team found that these deaths had all occurred under similar conditions: victims were from Dalit and tribal communities who struggled to find jobs in villages where food, work and pension programmes programmes were defunct. Each of the victims also belonged to those Dalit or low-caste communities that have been historically denied equal access to natural resources, job opportunities and education. Rupesh’s team tried to provide a relevant context for the conditions of ‘starvation’. They cited the Supreme Court Commissioner’s definition of that term from a document called the Starvation Protocol.

The Commissioners wrote the Protocol in consultation with a team of economic, medical and nutrition experts in India called the ‘Hunger Watch Group’. The goal was to urge governments to consider community-wide consultations between local officials, affected and concerned citizens and doctors to respond to people afflicted with chronic hunger, malnutrition, starvation and corresponding diseases associated with undernutrition. The Protocol’s definitions of ‘hunger’ and ‘starvation’ were originally devised by the Jan Swasthya Abhiyan in their 2003 ‘Guidelines for Investigating Starvation Deaths’ and meant to provide citizens and officials criteria for identifying the needs of people suffering discrete, yet related, stages of demise, and addressing them through social programmes and medical care. ‘Hunger’ was understood to be the ‘denial of adequate food to ensure [an] active and healthy life’ while ‘starvation’ was the state in which ‘hunger is prolonged to an extent that it threatens survival.’

These consultations would be based on a two-part ‘verbal autopsy’. Phase 1 would be held with the family of a person suffering hunger to assess their food and work conditions and the social programmes they had access to. Phase 2 would be held with the wider community—‘members of the tribe, caste…to which the affected people belong’—to similarly, identify potential challenges that could be faced by larger numbers of people yet to be identified, such as being denied access to anganwadi centers, ration shops and social security benefits. The District Panchayat would be tasked with reporting the findings and coordinating with District Collectors to provide immediate relief to individuals, and long-term access to programmes for communities being excluded from benefits. The idea, the protocol says, is to approach the crisis as a public health concern and to identify people living with hunger and malnutrition-related ailments before deaths actually occurred. ‘Few people die directly die of starvation,’ the Protocol states. ‘They live with severe food deficits for long periods, and tend to succumb to diseases that they would have survived if they were well-nourished. Starvation does not require absolutely zero food intake, but rather prolonged periods of such low food intake as to be incompatible with survival.’

In the context of this definition, Rupesh’s report provided a glimpse of how each poor person, already malnourished and living in extreme poverty, lost their battle with hunger and disease when each of the eight food, work, nutrition and pension programmes meant to ensure food security under the Supreme Court’s orders on the right to food did not deliver services as promised. Local and state government officials did not respond to the report.

In October 2009, the local media reported the starvation death of a woman named Murti Devi who had lived in the village of Tetua Tola. Rupesh conducted an investigation in her village and submitted his findings to the Supreme Court Commissioner’s office. He reported that people were not receiving rations from the grain shop for six months, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme was defunct and, as in other drought-and hunger-prone villages, people were migrating to other areas of Bihar and various other states to find work to avoid hunger.

Rupesh decided to bring Murti Devi’s case to the public’s attention. He told us that the goal was to spur the action that should have followed the tragedy in Jalhi. He gave interviews to print and television outlets. ‘After we brought her [Murti Devi’s] case to the public’s attention in light of other deaths that occurred over the last few years in the state,’ he said, ‘a debate emerged over how to stop the starvation deaths from happening.’

The people of Tetua Tola protested Murti Devi’s unnecessary death by staging a roadblock near the village. Debates appeared in local print and television media outlets on how to address the crisis. But the rage over capricious public responses to unnecessary deaths and failed social programmes did not hasten serious and committed government action to address these woes.

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The deaths in Jalhi were integral to the larger story of public action on starvation deaths in Bihar. The incident was so tragic that it made the state advisors aware of the importance of collecting discrete primary data on the social and economic conditions of poor villages and vulnerable communities on a regular basis. It also made local journalists more vigilant about such deaths and better prepared to cover similar cases that would occur in the future. But the long-term result of fact-finding missions, to Rupesh’s frustration, was not compliance with laws. The programmes and policies in existence to prevent such travesties from happening in the first place were not implemented or followed.

Why did the media’s timely reporting and the frequent investigations by right-to-food activists not translate into real pressure on the government, either to mend broken social programmes, or to recognize and enforce the rights of poor people to these programmes?

We went to the village hoping to learn about the tragedy from the viewpoint of the people who lived through those days in August 2005. We wanted to know the conditions of hunger, employment and access to public services at the time of the deaths, what action had taken place afterward, and if any changes had occurred to date which improved their food security and ability to access social programmes.

A Jesuit priest named Father Jose runs an organization called Jeevan Sangham in Bodh Gaya, about a kilometre from the site of the tree where Siddharta Gautama found enlightenment. People from all over the world come to see that tree, which no longer exists; while a short distance away, the descendents of the people that the Buddha saw have inherited their suffering. They exist and no one sees any of them. Since