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Chemistry of news
SEVANTI NINAN
WHEN Lady Naipaul rose to make her point at the "Pravasi Bharatiya Divas", her mix of pedigree, panache and provocation ensured that she walked onto the front page of every newspaper and into every TV news bulletin in that instant. That is the chemistry of news. It was a reality that every sad bundle of a human being huddled in a freezing sports stadium some 10 kilometres away, who didn't make it into most TV bulletins and most newspapers the next day, was forced to contend with.
For actually, two gatherings of Indians took place in Delhi last fortnight.
One effortlessly got saturation coverage, the other struggled to get noticed, despite the mandatory presence of a celebrity, a suitably weighty one too, and not a "celeb" of the Nafisa Ali category. One event celebrated success and kinship, the other paraded hunger, both sullen and resigned. You had the first ever festival of Non Resident Indians which I don't have to tell you about because it was covered silly. And then you had the first ever public hearing on the Right to Food: a symposium of the marginalised, billed as "Living with Hunger".
It required as much organisation at least as the more splashy event. Some 40 plus non governmental organisations marshalled people who do not get enough to eat all year round from their remote villages in some 10 or 12 States, so that hunger could be brought to Delhi's doorstep, in an effort to be noticed. In a sense it was trying to ride on the other event, because that brought Amartya Sen to Delhi at this time of the year and the organisers sensibly assumed that his presence would enable their show to at least register a blip on the media radar. They were right. Even The Hindu, the Deccan Herald and Star News who were there to do their liberal duty by covering the event, were grateful for the peg.
If you were looking for dramatic content, in pure news making terms, there was no shortage of it at the more ragged meeting. Those running the Right to Food Campaign have learned to make covering poverty neat and easy for city scribes. The handout were ready, with testimonies of those who have seen hunger kill their family members, and statistics of all kinds to back up the human interest stories. The victims had been brought to Delhi, for TV cameras to capture sound bites from in 10 minutes and run. Nor did you have to journey to the most severely drought-affected districts to see how the hungry were coping. There were two charts depicting what those with zero purchasing power eat when drought conditions persist: one for forest based subsistence foods, the other for agro based ones. Neither would be recognised as food by even animals in our cities.
Hunger which does not end in a starvation death does not make news. But it does make India the country with simply the highest incidence of endemic hunger in the world. And certainly the only country that matches the hunger with surplus foodstocks The 1998-99 National Family Health Survey found 47 per cent of the country's children undernourished. Africa has great famines, said Sen, but even that country does not have as many living with hunger on a day-to-day basis as we do. The Right to Food Campaign began as an effort to get India's food mountains out of the godowns and into food for work programmes.
Even if the 50 million tonne surplus has come down somewhat, we still have masses of unused food.
Even as the poor have no purchasing capacity. A man from Shivpuri in Madhya Pradesh stood up at the public hearing and said matter-of-factly, that he'd only managed to get 10 days of wage labour in the past two years. The rest of the time he fed his family on what he could buy by selling firewood.
Another from Jharkhand stood up and mumbled that he ate every third day. A third from Rajasthan talked about how four people in his family had died and how irked the sub-divisional magistrate had been at the deaths and the headache it would cause him. In this State, things are so irredeemably bad on account of last year's drought that moneylenders in villages have stopped giving loans.
Hunger is primarily a failure of governance issue. The campaign's documentation shows that fair price shops are closing down, rather than more of them starting up. Amartya Sen wanted to make the larger point that hunger in India is squarely a matter of policy. Expenditure in subsidising food gone in a completely different direction. The priority is to keep food prices high for the seller, not low for the buyer. Farmers have political clout. The hungry, with no purchasing capacity, don't. For policies to change, you have to bring the voice of the other side to the public arena, said Sen.
Which is where the Jan sunvais or the public hearings of the kind that took place last fortnight, come in. In 2002 these were held in Shankargarh in Uttar Pradesh, Palamau in Jharkhand, Kalahandi in Orissa, and Kelawada in Rajasthan. In terms of attendance and coverage they were more effective than the one in Delhi. At the Kelawada Jan Sunvai there were more than 30 IAS officers. In Delhi, the Union Food Secretary did not come, nor did a single politician. Less than five representatives of government were present, and only one spoke.
The media came in somewhat larger numbers than policy makers but finding space in newspapers and on TV subsequently is a different issue. Even with Sen, the event did not make it into any TV channel's headlines. Aaj Tak and Zee News did not even manage to fit it into their bulletins that day. As for the Hindi newspapers, except for something on page two of the Navbharat Times, it got nary a mention. Not in Dainik Jagran, or Jansatta, or Hindustan, or Rashtriya Sahara.
The NRIs made big news because it was an upbeat event. And for the same reason food gets more media space today than hunger. Far more newsprint is consumed by food columns which we all love reading. The public arena Sen talks of is shrinking. Except for a self- appointed P. Sainath, we don't even have people who cover hunger as a beat. But the tribe of food critics is growing, and even includes the gifted editor of the Hindustan Times.
E-mail the writer at sevanti_ninan@yahoo.co.in
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