Starvation and the judicial conscience

By S. Swaminathan

Starvation deaths, which are now the nation's most scandalous testimony to misgovernance, are not, of course, unprecedented. They have not made it to the media top-line all these years, mainly for two reasons. First, the general fatalistic notion which has governed the public attitude is that in a populous country, there are bound to be vulnerable, marginalised groups of people, whose access to food must remain insecure, until that is when the country becomes self-sufficient in food production.

The current situation of a food output of around 200 million tonnes and of a public stock exceeding 60 million tonnes challenges this fatalistic, callous indifference to human starvation. Second, as Professor Amartya Sen has often pointed out, mass famines of the kind British India had to endure, become the ``staple diet'' for newspapers while lingering death caused by prolonged stages of malnutrition that afflicts the poor, gets mixed up with ``death due to natural causes'' and thus escapes public condemnation and social indignation.

That starvation deaths as those which have been reported from Orissa point to a major collapse of civilisational equity may sound too normative a judgment of misgovernance but the fact remains that such starvation deaths have occurred in the past, for instance, in the notorious Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput region in Orissa with little ameliorative correction being seen.

The PIL on starvation

The public interest litigation (PIL) filed by the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), at the Supreme Court, marks a watershed in the evolution of social conscience on poverty in general and on starvation deaths in particular. The apathy which has so far governed the public psyche and the mindset of the ruling class are now under challenge. Seeing how huge mountains of foodstocks have been piled up by the Food Corporation of India (FCI), it would no longer be tenable to rationalise starvation deaths on the basis of inadequacy of food production.

The issue then is whether or not the norms of governance in this country should include ``entitlement to food'' as an integral part of ``protection of life'' under Article 21 of the Constitution of India. What is equally important is the need to extricate the question of ``entitlement to food'' from bureaucratic discrimination which takes the form of a vexatious exercise of identifying the poor as those belonging to the ``Below the Poverty Line'' (BPL) in order that they would be eligible for food rations at highly subsidised rates. How farcical the whole system of public distribution system (PDS) has become, is brought out by the fact (admitted by the Union Government before the Supreme Court) that as many as 13 States including Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, are yet to identify the BPL families. Would this fact have come into the public domain but for the PIL, one wonders.

The Supreme Court has ordered the States and four Union Territories to complete the process of enumeration of BPL families within two weeks (from the date of the order - September 3). While the Court has insisted that the primary task of the governments (the Centre and the States) is to prevent any more starvation deaths, it appears to have endorsed Food-for-Work programmes as the effective mode of intervention by the Governments.

Given the all-too-lethargic patterns of public developmental administration at the district and at the lower levels, this prescription is bound to evoke scepticism. The much larger question of ensuring free access for the ``very poor'' for food stocked in public godowns ensuring an irreducible minimum nutrition, needs to be addressed. The Government's announcement of the Antyodaya scheme did generate some optimism but it now looks as if the scheme is deadlocked by the inability of State governments to identify the beneficiaries.

All the diseconomies of massive food stocks (including exorbitant carrying costs and inefficiencies compounded with corruption) might have become integral features of a so-called food security system but as the Supreme Court has pointed out, FCI foodstocks must reach the starving people and not allowed to be dumped into the sea or consumed by rodents. Schemes galore for food distribution are no answer if they do not get implemented on the ground. All this is not asking for too much. After all, freedom from hunger, is a basic constituent of any civilised society and if governance is not committed to this fundamental human concern, it hardly deserves to be so described.

The very fact that the social conscience of the judiciary had to be invoked over the question is enough to damn the entire machinery of the Government. PIL as an instrument for dealing with the excesses of the executive or with deprivation/denial of basic human freedoms owing to deliberate State neglect or pervasive unconcern, has already come to be recognised as a benign process of empowerment of the voiceless poor.

The question is whether PIL should increasingly involve the judiciary in playing the role of an ombudsman in alerting the State to its basic function of governance including administrative procedures and modalities as those which are inherent in identifying the poor and the starving among them as if these are such distinct categories!

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