India's hungry and enslaved: Badar Alam Iqbal examines two major problems confronting India.

• Author: Iqbal, Badar Alam
• Position: Hunger and slavery

India is the home of 25 per cent of the world's 842 million hungry people. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute's 2013 global hunger index, as many as 17.5 per cent of the people are under-nourished; 40.2 per cent of children are under-weight; and the under-five mortality rate is 6.1 per cent. Because of these shocking figures, India is classified as in the 'alarming category'. The hunger has resulted in slavery. With nearly 14 million slaves, India is home to half of the global slave population. The hunger and slavery trends are adversely affecting the country's growth and development.

**********

Globally, between 2010 and 2013, nearly 842 million persons suffered chronic hunger, not having enough food for an active and healthy life. Most of the planets under-nourished persons are still to be found in South Asia, closely followed by sub-Sahara Africa and East Asia. Reducing hunger depends upon economic growth. But economic growth may not lead to more and better jobs and incomes for all, unless and until policies specifically target the poor. In poor nations, hunger and poverty reduction will only be attained with growth that is not only sustained but also broadly shared.

Developing nations as a whole have to make significant efforts to achieve the target of halving the proportion of hungry people by the end of 2015. These nations have also to make considerable and immediate additional efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals.

According to the Rome-based Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), the number of hungry people has actually been declining steadily worldwide over the last two decades, that is, between 1990-92 and 2010-12, although progress has slowed since 2007. In 2009-10, the globe had had 870 million hungry people. The same trend has been evident in the case of India. Whereas in 1990-92 there were 240 million undernourished people, in 2010-12 the number had declined to 217 million, representing a 9.3 per cent reduction. In terms of proportion of India's overall population, the under-nourished declined by 9.4 per cent, that is, from 26.9 per cent to 17.5 per cent during the period under review (Table 1). The FAO further observed that the great recession of 2008-09 resulted in a mild slowdown only in GDP growth in many developing economies, and that increases in domestic staple food prices were very small in China, India and Indonesia. (1)

Unchanged figure

Although the number of hungry persons is judged to have declined slightly from the 870 million projected in 2010-12, the latest global hunger index (GHI) report, produced by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), points out that this decline is the result of re-calculation of how under-nourishment is measured by the Food Agriculture Organisation. (2) Since 2006, the absolute number of under-nourished people has remained un changed, but their proportion of global population has declined as that population has grown.

The 2013...