It is unusual,if not unheard of,for this columnist to tread carefully but this week I am going to because the subject is Sonia Gandhi and her food bill. To speak against Sonia is tantamount to blasphemy. As a conscientious objector to foreigners ruling India,I used to object to her political role. Until the people of India made it clear that she was their favourite leader. I stopped then but her friends and flunkeys continue to disparage me as a Sonia-baiter. To say anything against her food bill is as risky because the NGO types who drafted it on her behalf have turned the debate into a fight between rich and poor.
So let me begin by stating unambiguously that I believe that the most shameful statistic of all is that 45 per cent of Indias children are officially malnourished. Let me add that the famines I have covered continue to haunt me because I have never seen anything more painful than the sight of a small child starving slowly to death. It takes months of suffering for them to reach that point when all they can do is whimper pitifully for the food their parents cannot afford to give them. The reason why Indian children continue to starve is because the schemes that our socialist rulers have devised to prevent this happening have never worked. They have been too centralised,too tangled in red tape and run mostly by corrupt and wicked officials who could not care less if children,other than their own,starved to death. The food security law will fail for exactly the reasons listed above.
In Nandurbar in 2003,I saw how all it took was free kitchens run by volunteers to save the lives of children who lived in villages close enough to the town of Akalkowa. I saw again the inhumanity of the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) when it operates in a famine. It provided Rs 40 worth of food to children whose parents could prove to the doctors in the Akalkowa hospital that they were on the verge of death. As soon as the children recovered,they were sent home to starve again because their parents could only afford to give them one meal of watery gruel a day.
If Sonia Gandhi is genuinely concerned about food security,what she needs to do is start by accepting that centralised schemes of the kind envisaged in her new bill can never work. What will work are free kitchens run by village women who do not like to see their children starving to death. The Supreme Court has often and correctly expressed its horror at millions of tonnes of food grain rotting in the open while children starve. It must be distributed free if possible but is it? Can you distribute it in remote villages to which there are no roads? Does the infrastructure exist not just to transport grain but store it? In earlier times there were granaries in every village temple that stored grain for times of need? Can they be revived? Would they be allowed to be revived by our secular rulers?
Nothing would make me happier than to live in a country in which not a single child went to bed hungry at night. Nothing would make me happier than to see every Indian child eat at least one nutritious meal a day because without it,everything else becomes irrelevant.
My objection to this food security bill is that not only is it not the solution but it will lull our political leaders into believing that they have solved the problem. And,if 45 per cent of our children continue to be declared malnourished by international standards,they will simply say at election time that they have done the best they can but corrupt state governments have not done their bit. It is a movie we have all seen so often before that it should never,never be made again. So please Soniaji,respected and honourable Soniaji,withdraw your wretched bill and give us some real change instead.
Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ Tavleen_Singh
