BTN: Why India can't feed its people, asks Canadian media,

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From: sri venkat <ahvenkitesh@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 5:17 PM
Subject: India.ozg.in - Why India can't feed its people, asks Canadian media, Deccan Herald, July 19, 2011 [1 Attachment]
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http://www.deccanherald.com/content/177194/why-india-cant-feed-its.html

Why India can't feed its people, asks Canadian media
Toronto, July 18 (IANS)

In this Year of India in Canada, India is making news in the media here -
not for the second highest growth rate in the world but for its ''absolute
poverty'' and failure to ''feed its people.'

The Canadian media has also likened "the boom in Bihar" to "a whimper.
Writing under the headline 'Why India can't feed its people,' the country's
biggest daily Toronto Star reported from New Delhi Sunday, "Food is an
all-consuming crisis here. Waste is only one facet. Agriculture,
infrastructure, inflation, innovation and corruption are others. It is a
scourge and challenge for this country of 1.2 billion people...''

According to it, "40 percent of Indian children remain chronically
malnourished,'' with this figure in some parts of India even higher than
some sub-Saharan countries.

Citing reports of hungry children eating mud in parts of Uttar Pradesh, the
newspaper story said, "Today, there is less food available for each Indian
resident that there was 30 years ago. In 2008, the most recent year for
which statistics are available, India produced 436 grams of food grains per
person per day, a drop from 445.3 in 2006.''

The report said, "As much as 40 per cent of all the fruits, vegetables and
food grains grown in India never make it to the market.

The country wastes more grain each year than Australia produces, and more
fruits and vegetables than the UK consumes.''

Blaming the lack of R&D for the crisis in the Indian agriculture sector
which has led to 200,000 suicides since 1997, the report said, "While China
pumps $3.5 billion into agricultural research - Chinese farmers grew 6.2
metric tons of rice per hectare in 2008, double India's output - India's
spends a fraction of that.''

In another story from Dharampur Mushahar Toll in Bihar, the national daily
Globe and Mail reported Sunday that "the boom in Bihar sounds more like a
whimper.''

Bihar, which has the lowest literacy rate, the highest child-mortality rate
and the lowest life expectancy in India, has become a synonym not for
intractable despair, but for turnaround under a new reformist government led
by "a pot-bellied, teetotalling socialist engineer named Nitish Kumar,'' the
report said.

But "to travel in Bihar - in the rural areas or in the capital, Patna, where
the streets are choked with garbage and the lights flicker out every couple
of hours - is to see both how the place has changed, and how terribly far it
has to go. And it is in this, more than anything else, that Bihar is
emblematic of India - of its dark side of absolute poverty and exclusion,
and how very difficult a task it is to change them,'' the report said.

The paper said, "*Half the children (in Dharampur Mushahar Toll) are without
clothes; a third of them have the deep hacking coughs and crusted snot of
chronic respiratory-tract infections. *In the newly built early-learning
centre, a gaggle of three-year-olds sits beneath one tattered poster of the
English alphabet - not that there is anyone around who can read it.

*Few people have any food in their tiny houses; they buy what they can each
day after working on the land of higher-caste villagers.''

*But giving credit to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who inherited a "wretched
mess" after "15 years of misrule by a theatrical thug Lalu Prasad Yadav and
his wife Rabri", the report said that under him "the reign of the
criminals (has) collapsed;* now, in the evenings, the city streets throng
with shoppers and families out for ice cream.''

Infrastructure construction is booming, school enrollments have doubled and
doctors and teachers show up for duty on time.

But "Mr (Nitish) Kumar, however good his intentions, cannot leapfrog his
state into the 21st century. He can drag it to 1950, or 1970. But not to
2011. And there are pockets just like Bihar all over India where this is
true.''

--

One Man with courage is a Majority.
Andrew Jackson

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