It is a fact that India is a country of acute hunger. On the global hunger scale it is ranked at 65. On the malnutrition index its record is even more dreadful. Many Sub-Saharan African countries, which are described as experiencing intense poverty, are several notches above India both in hunger and malnutrition. According to the United Nations, more than two-hundred million people in India are malnourished. The National Family Health Survey-Ill (NFHS) 2005-6 indicated that 49% of children in India were malnourished. NFHS-III also pointed out alarming incidences of underweight children and anaemic adolescent girls. All these figures run counter to the dominant narrative of an economic tiger, with India fifth among the countries with the highest number of billionaires in the world, surpassing industrialised countries like the United Kingdom, Japan and Canada. The reasons for this alarming reality are many. The major reason for India's acute hunger and malnutrition can be attributed to the systematicmarginalisation of millet in the Indian food and farming systems. This marginalisation has happened counter to the food and farming realities of India. The unfathomable X factor in the country's food sociology, history and politics is that India is thelargest producer of millet in the world. Globally, it is also the largest consumer of millet, accounting for more than 40%.These irrefutable truths should have propelled millet to the top of the food and fanning policy table of the country. But this hasnot happened. The millet cultivation area in India has suffered a great crash, while wheat cultivation, piggybacking on the Green Revolution (i.e. chemical) technology, has exploded and rice has held its ground. As the era of economic neoliberalism swept into India in the 1990s, agriculture followed suit, tuning into the cultivation of commodity crops such as cotton and sugarcane. Thus, Indian farming policy was shaped to earn money instead of creating a billion plus food-secure homes.
展开▼
