 "Photo: Flickr user HelpAge")
As Delhi prepares for the 2010 Commonwealth games, the city is being completely transformed. I traveled there in January to research the right to food for a UNDP report, two years after my first visit. This time, having come to see what had changed, I was greeted by streets lined with piles of bricks and mounds of dirt. Women in tightly wrapped saris hoed the earth as their children played next to them, and mixed groups of men and women laid bricks in new walls. I watched them daily as my auto-rickshaw was crisscrossing the city to deliver me to meetings, and I wondered whether all this construction was really any good - if this was employment for the unemployed or if, when the games came, undesirable people would be swept out of sight. I wanted to know whether life had really improved for those at the bottom of society.
I found that it hasn’t. When I met with Dipa Sinha, one of the Commissioners monitoring the implementation of the still-open 2001 Supreme Court case on the right to food, she informed me that reports of starvation deaths have been higher in the past year than in any year since the opening of the case. There is still no India-wide system to ensure that the Court’s orders are put into action, and relief for starving communities happens in a haphazard way, if at all.
Sinha told me that she has seen people that they are monitoring die over the course of a year. In a typical case, a report will come that a marginalized community is starving and without any work. NGOs lobby the local and state governments to provide government guaranteed employment and subsidized grains. But these communities have often been cut off from social services due to discrimination against minorities, and when the requesting organization follows up with the authorities, none of the promised actions have been taken. By that time, a handful of severely hungry persons will have died. In these ignored communities there are always malnourished people who are on the brink of dying from starvation.
It is hard for me to take this information in, but it is what I have traveled here to learn: to search for signs of implementation of the right to food orders, and to evaluate the direction that the right to food is taking in India. And overall, I found that one of the many paradoxes of modern India is the juxtaposition of its rapid economic growth with the poverty that seems to have only intensified in the most vulnerable communities.
Journalist David Rieff is writing a book on malnutrition and hunger. I had breakfast with him at the India Habitat Center, an oasis of calm in the middle of Construction City. I found myself disoriented as I ate huevos rancheros in an American style diner, with Abba playing in the background, all while we discussed the “why” of modern India's paradox.
Were we still in Delhi?
Rieff pointed out some of the unique aspects of Indian hunger. The gender question, for example, looms large in India. In other countries, Rieff has found, a household with food will have equally fed women and men, while in India a household with food might have a nourished man and a malnourished woman. And then there are other key indicators of health that are missing. He has traveled extensively in China, and he said he can drink the water there - not so in India. There is also no comparison with the level of open defecation found in India. As he spoke I had a flashback to my 2008 trip to inner Uttar Pradesh, the first time I had seen so many people openly defecate. There is no infrastructure to deliver basic services like sewage.
Yet, I thought to myself, India has plans to test a new space shuttle, with an eye to making headway in the satellite industry. This is part of the paradox: impressive development is taking place at the highest level. But the bottom rungs can’t subsist on plans for a spaceship. Poverty at the bottom is still a life and death emergency.
David Rieff mentioned another aspect of India's paradox: the economic boom has resulted in an even greater divide between the classes, with newly minted cities for the rich that allow the affluent to screen out the signs of poverty and, perhaps, most importantly, interactions with the poor.
What I came to think of as the “car and driver set" is a good illustration of this phenomenon. Delhi smells. (As do Mumbai, Chennai, and other Indian cities.) It is extremely noisy. Instead of using turn signals or staying in one’s lane (when it is even marked) you instead make ample use of your car horn. All of this can give you an instant headache. But if you have a car and a driver, you are insulated from the smell, the noise, and the stress of the drive. This phenomenon is not new, but the greater number of people catapulted into this “car and driver” class, and the construction of new suburbs to house them, has left India more and more stratified. Rieff pointed to Gurgaon, a suburb on the edge of Delhi, as an example of this new arrangement.
Coincidentally, I was having dinner there that very night. When I spoke to the friend I would be meeting he said, “I’m warning you, Gurgaon is my least favorite place in India.” This was a strong statement from a person who had a deep affection for the country.
I arrived in the dark. “This isn’t so bad,” I said to him. I had been bracing for Armageddon.
“You haven’t seen it in the day. There’s no infrastructure. The workers and their families that have come to build this place have no toilets, no water, no electricity. In the daylight, the whole city smells like shit. Of course, from inside the office buildings, you can’t smell it. They even have their own electricity generators for when the power goes off.”
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