The Hindu : Women and food insecurity

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Oct 25, 2002

Opinion

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Women and food insecurity

By Brinda Karat

Food insecurity created by the virtual disbanding of the public distribution system devalues women's status in a myriad ways.

SARKARI PRESCRIPTIONS for women's empowerment miss one of its main prerequisites, namely, to be able to live a hunger-free life. In much of rural India, where drought has been converted into mass hunger due to official policies of disinvestment in minimum responsibilities for the provision of public welfare, women in poor families are hit the hardest. In a fortnight-long campaign for food and work run by the All India Democratic Women's Association in Uttar Pradesh, women's experiences reiterated the truth that food insecurity created by the virtual disbanding of the public distribution system devalues women's status in a myriad ways.

Hunger is accompanied by vulnerability to humiliation and exploitation. There is a cascading impact of food deprivation on the lives of women. They are willing to work at lower rates ranging from eight to ten rupees, they perform menial jobs in the homes of the rural rich for the payment of a few rotis that they take home to their children, they tolerate insults and abuse, including sometimes sexual abuse, their entire being is geared to the struggle for food for their families.

Prabhavati is an agricultural worker in the village of Jamauli in Uttar Pradesh's Mirzapur district. Her strong voice as she speaks into the microphone belies her frail exterior. She has come along with hundreds of other women from neighbouring villages to a demonstration for food and work, at the district headquarters of Chunar. "I had a below poverty line card," she said. "Last year we hardly got any work, this year it has been even worse because of the drought. We work on others land or as daily wage workers for anyone who will hire us. My husband has been sick so I have been out looking for work. Because we had no money we could not buy our rations regularly. This year the sarkar took my white card (BPL, or Below Poverty Line). Later they gave me a yellow card (APL or Above Poverty Line). When I went to the ration shop, the man laughed and said "now you are ameer (rich) why have you come here for rations?" "The Government has not given me or my husband any work so how can they say I am now rich?" How indeed? Ramkali of Mohona village, refused a BPL card, was told, "Sons are wealth, and since you have four sons you are wealthy". "But they are small, their ages range from two to ten," she argued, but to no avail. They did not change the colour of her card.

In a meeting at Surapur village in Sultanpur, at least sixty women, all widows, stood up together with yellow cards in their hands. Many of them were landless. Some of them owned a few biswa (cents) of land that had not been cultivated this year or last year because of the lack of rainfall and because they could not afford any other means of irrigation given the hikes in the rates of diesel and electricity. The same story of deprivation and hunger, and the same reasons for them, were repeated in meeting after meeting attended by women from about 100 villages, across the districts of Chandauli, Mirzapur, Ambedkar Nagar, Sultanpur and rural Lucknow, where AIDWA is organising a struggle against hunger.

The problem does not just concern individual cases of mistaken categorisation of a family's economic status which at least in theory can be rectified. The problem lies in the system of targeting itself. Targeting in a predominantly poor country like India means demarcating not between the rich and the poor, but between different categories of the poor, to "target" some of them for benefits regarding access to cheap food that actually all of them require. It is based on the creation not the elimination of mistaken identities, aimed at statistically reducing the numbers of the poor, even though in real terms an increasing number of people are getting more and more poor. It is a system based not on need but on arbitrarily decided quotas that do not recognise, leave alone address, the ongoing process of pauperisation of vast sections of the rural population.

If Prabhavati does not lift her quota of rations, the Government response is not to lower the prices of foodgrains to make them more affordable, but to exclude her from the system itself. The poor thus get punished for their poverty.

At a well-attended women's sit-in before the Chakia tehsil headquarters in Chandauli district, the harassed sub-divisional magistrate was unable to refute the facts presented by the women. There had been a drastic reduction in workdays this year, the women said, down to just about six weeks to two months of work. The Government had failed to provide work. The magistrate admitted that the numbers of those who should "qualify" for a BPL card would be "at least half the population in the area under his jurisdiction". At present, of a total of 36,480 families with ration cards in one of the most badly drought affected tehsils, where starvation deaths have been reported, only 3,322 families have BPL cards.

In fact, the women's delegations that spoke to officials were not interested in BPL cards. They felt the prices in BPL cards were far too high, the difference between BPL card prices and market prices was too narrow to compensate the time lost in cleaning the rotten grain, or in waiting for the ration shop to open. The earlier popular demand for a BPL card has been replaced by the demand for a "red" Antodaya card. At every meeting held during the AIDWA campaign, when the question, "How many of you have red cards" was asked, a loud protest would be heard, and then a forest of hands would go up. "We all need those cards" was the refrain.

In December 2000, the Prime Minister as his birthday gift to the poor had announced the Antodaya scheme, namely, the provision of 35 kg of foodgrains at Rs.2 a kg per family a month for wheat and Rs. 3 for rice to the "poorest of the poor" arbitrarily decided as being around one crore in the whole country. Apart from the gross underestimate in numbers, the criteria of eligibility for benefits accruing under this scheme further lowers the standards of human existence. It is like telling a hungry family that they cannot be that hungry if they have shared two rotis, since there are those who have shared only one. And who is to decide on eligibility? In a bizarre replay of the inspector raj system against which the rich had many complaints, inspectors, instead of checking the piles of currency notes hidden away in designer mattresses, now search the meagre belongings of the poor to decide if they qualify for the much sought after red card.

Poor women see the red card as a way out of their dependence on the landlord or the richer families in the village.

One of the important recommendations made by the high level Abhijit Sen Committee set up by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs and Food in the context of the huge stocks of over 6 crore tonnes of foodgrains rotting in Government godowns is precisely what the women demand — an "expansion of the existing Antodaya scheme of food support, to become a food security system for the entire destitute population, in particular old people, the disabled, widows and other single women without regular support". It also significantly calls for a reversion to the universal public distribution system and the provision of foodgrains at half the present BPL prices, analysing in detail the utter failure of the targeted system. These recommendations have an immediate and urgent relevance. Each day's delay by the Government in implementing the Committee's recommendations is yet another day that Prabhavati, Ramkali, and their sisters must go hungry.

We need a much more widespread struggle to force the Government to implement at least those parts of the report that will bring food into their homes.

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