Sampurna Das


Surviving on foraged wild taro in Karbi Anglong during pandemic (Photo Credit: Sumaina)


Food became an important part of politics during the pandemic lockdown…First, state’s decision of providing a few kilos of rice and pulses became a site of defining a standardized citizen ... Second, one could observe a diminishing role of the state and greater responsibility on non-government entities to deliver food to the needy.

 

By the end of March 2020, owing to the abrupt nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, a food crisis emerged in India. In mid-April the state was trying out different measures to tackle the food crisis under the National Food Security Act (NFSA). In Assam, thestate government announced 5 kgs of rice per month per member to those without ration cards. However, given India’s weak food supply chain, these relief packages did not reach the desired hands. A survey of women in the state  meant to identify the impact of lockdown on pre-existing structural social and economic vulnerabilities showed that only around two percent of the population received the COVID-19 special government support.

 

Availability, access, stability and utilisation of food are four pillars of food security. The pandemic has challenged these pillars, particularly for the most vulnerable and poor population. Scenes of empty shelves, long queues outside the fair price shops (FPS), community workers being jailed for questioning the siphoning of rice from the FPS stores, were widespread in the news channels and social media. They spoke of the anxieties of shortages and supply lapses. People were worried about the country’s supply infrastructure: Where and how will the food come from?

This piece builds on anthropological works like that of Melissa Cladwell[i] and Neringa Klumblyte[ii] that examine food, not as a neutral entity, but intimately bound up with politics of production, supply and consumption of food. Food became an important part of politics during the pandemic lockdown in several ways. First, state’s decision of providing a few kilos of rice and pulses became a site of defining a standardized citizen for the expansion of large-scale governance policies. Second, one could observe a diminishing role of the state and greater responsibility on non-government entities to deliver food to the needy.

State’s Imagination and Food Packages

 To begin with, the consumption of food – what constitutes a basic diet – became a means for the state to organise its population into different categories for a large-scale planning exercise. As anthropologist James Scott points out, state machinery has always defined generic subjects who “needed so many square feet of housing space, acres of farmland, litres of clean water, and units of transportation and so much food”[iii]. These citizens have no gender, tastes, history or opinions. The state’s imagination of its citizens was singularly abstract. Looking closely at the items given in the food relief packages illuminates how food is an everyday medium through which state imaginations of its citizens are articulated and constructed.

The Indian state when ascertaining the COVID-19 food relief packages neglected the “absorption (nutrition)” component of food security underlined by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). They just gave few kilos rice and pulses. Social anthropologist Graeme MacRae has outlined that the state resonates the view shared by multinational food corporations and the World Bank, that the only realistic way to deal with food scarcity is through large- scale, high-tech and input-invasive methods[iv]. These processes come under the umbrella term of food security as opposed to the idea of food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is a bottom-up approach to tackle food needs that relies on understanding the specific food cultures and building agricultural systems towards supporting these food cultures, shared by target vulnerable communities, and built on foundations of local and practical knowledge.

“But can five kilograms of rice be enough, can it? What about pulses, salt, oil, milk for my child? Ever since lockdown, I am regularly foraging wild taro to eat with rice. But how long?”

Advocating the idea of food security, the Indian state categorises its vulnerable population as those who can survive on paltry amounts of rice and pulses. The culinary imagination of its citizens by the state falls short on the ground. This, however, is nothing new as tackling hunger in India has always been about food security and not food sovereignty, even as more than one-third of the Indian population is estimated to be poor and half of all children are malnourished in one way or another[v]. A cursory look at the food security measures highlights the abstracted image of the Indian state of its vulnerable population. A case in point is the falling per capita calorie intake between 1983 and 2004-05 for the rural population from 2240 kcal per day to 2047 kcal per day, and the urban population from 2070 kcal per day to 2021 kcal per day. This is much less than the norm of 2400 calories in rural areas and 2100 in urban areas. In the same period the per capita protein consumption declined from 63.5 grams to 55.8 grams per day in rural areas and 58.1 grams to 55.4 grams in urban areas[vi].

“Suddenly the lockdown was announced. It took me a few days to realise that even the town – otherwise a place of opportunities – could be out of work. The sight of the closed shops and queue for food relief of five kilograms rice confirmed that something was amiss. But can five kilograms of rice be enough, can it? What about pulses, salt, oil, milk for my child? Ever since lockdown, I am regularly foraging wild taro to eat with rice. But how long? My child is not interested in taro curry anymore. I think I will have to move to my parents.”

- *Renu Terangpi, single mother and daily wage worker, Karbi Anglong, Assam


 State Obligations versus NGO Responsibility

 Further, the state has been relying increasingly on non-governmental organisations to feed the poor. The responsibilities seem to have already shifted. Our survey revealed that 33.85 percent of the people were helped by NGOs and 13.45 percent of respondents relied on the support of individuals and generous neighbours during the lockdown. Across different states in the country, the governmentpartnered with various NGOs to feed the needy. Reportssuggest that in some regions NGOs had outperformed the government in feeding the vulnerable. Inother cases like Odisha the governmentpartnered with NGOs as food delivery services.

The long history of takeover of various socioeconomic activities by NGOs for the vulnerable population – including food, education, microcredit and so on – has led to a situation in which the government can avoid its obligation to deliver food security services to vulnerable communities. This primarily has to do with the post-cold war era that saw the rise of a market- based neoliberal ideology which tends to de-emphasize the role of the state and highlight the role of non-state actors. Political scientists like John Clarke[vii] and Shamsul Haque[viii] have shown that neoliberal beliefs in market-led solutions, less state intervention and a greater role for non-state actors, have considerably increased the reliance of developing countries on NGOs. Elsewhere regarding Northeastern India, it was pointed out that inadequacy with state services has strengthened the rationale for partnership with NGOs to deliver basic services[ix].

This trend towards replacing the obligations and responsibilities of the government with those of NGOs has adverse implications for the rights of citizens to basic services. It also points to a direction where the social contract between the state and citizens is being redrafted due to the expanding role of NGOs and replacing the state’s obligation to deliver even essential services. Earlier, vulnerable populations had the right to hold public servants accountable; now this ability is only limited to paper. Instead, they have to rely on the charity or goodwill of NGOs. Rights of people are steadily replaced by charity or goodwill.

This excessive dependence on NGOs, however, means that society has to rely more on stopgap measures in place of much-needed structural changes. Sociologist James Petras has written on the experience of countries like Bolivia, Chile, Brazil and El Salvador where the coming of international NGOs on the one hand reduced government accountability, on the other it depoliticized the public[x]. By placing excessive importance on microcredit, for instance, rather than having citizens ask for social welfare, there is a depoliticisation of the public and a push towards a pro-market agenda. This segregates people into receivers and non-receivers of credit, relief and so on, and undermines popular unity.

“Unlike others, I do not have a ration card. I did not receive the 1000 rupees government was supposed to give us. No sight of the five kilograms of rice from government. Someone in the contractor might have taken our share, who knows. Like always. The government should take care. They are the ones to lock the country. They should also be the ones to provide food. An NGO gave us a one-time food package of rice, pulses, soybean, sugar, mustard oil, biscuits etc. Many like us are dependent on such NGO packages to survive now. The PDS shopkeeper says he has no idea about my share of rice. But, how long can we sustain on packages of NGO? They come occasionally. Hunger is permanent. If the lockdown continues, I am sure we will die not out of the disease but hunger. I do not know about others but surely, we cannot manage any longer without regular government assistance!”

- *Rahimon Nessa, widow and informal factory worker, Sonitpur, Assam.

 

Conclusion: More of the Same

 Seven months since the lockdown some of our respondents still await food packages the government had announced. In the midst of this, news of the COVID-19 rice supplies being illegally transported to the neighbouring state of Meghalaya was making rounds in the media. Many families did not receive food packages from NGOs either. This is the reality of the assurance the government had provided right at the start of the lockdown – government supply systems were broken and NGOs are not entitled enough to provide everyone. Anxieties about food and hunger prevail. This anxiety about food is part of the more generalised anxiety that the government does not care about the vulnerable anymore. Years of broken political promises add to this anxiety. The handling of the food relief made it obvious again. As such, food emerges as an everyday medium through which imaginations and ideologies of the state get articulated and circulated.


*All names have been changed

 

Sampurna Das is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi


[i] Caldwell, Melissa. 2002. The Taste of Nationalism: Food Politics in Postsocialist Moscow. Ethnos 67(3): 295– 319

[ii] Klumbyte, Neringa. 2010. The Soviet Sausage Renaissance. American Anthropologist 112(1): 22–37

[iii] Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press, pp 346

[iv] MacRae, Graeme. 2016. Food Sovereignty and the Anthropology of Food: Ethnographic approaches to policy and practice. Anthropological Forum 26(3): 227-232

[v] Dev, S. Mahendra, and Alakh N. Sharma. 2010. Food security in India: Performance, challenges and policies. Oxfam India

[vi] Suryanarayana, M. H. 1996. Food security and calorie adequacy across states: Implications for reform. Journal of Indian School of Political Economy 8(2): 203-65

[vii] Clark, John. 1995. The state, popular participation, and the voluntary sector. World Development 23(4): 593-601

[viii] Haque, M. Shamsul. 2020. A critique of the role of NGOs as partners in governance. Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration 42(1): 17-32

[ix] Das, Bijoy. 2019. GO-NGO partnership: A developmental approach for health sector in Northeast India. IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science 24(1): 28-32

[x] Petras, James. 1997. Imperialism and NGOs in Latin America. Monthly Review 49(7): 10