Hunger Can Drag Down Even the Free

KHARIAR, India — The women had been walking since midnight, traveling single file in the darkness from their villages 10 miles away in the black granite hills of Orissa, India’s poorest state. Balanced on their heads were bundles of branches and twigs they had stripped from the few trees left in the distant forests.

Through a pale dawn drizzle and a veil of smoke from dung fires, they formed a ghostly but elegant procession--a line of terribly thin barefoot women, erect as models on a fashion runway, silently bearing heavy loads they would sell in the firewood markets here for the equivalent of 50 cents. It takes two days to gather and deliver the wood, the only source of income for many families.

This is Kalahandi, poorest place in a poor land. If India has its own basket case, this is it. Famine stalks this place. So do malaria, leprosy and tuberculosis.

Kalahandi is also where a currently popular theory--that famine is not possible where a free press and democratic institutions exist--breaks down.

The problems in Kalahandi go deeper than its institutions and perpetuate themselves, said Fanindam Deo, a history professor and a descendant of the prince who once ruled here.

“People do have the right to change their local government,” he said, “but they do not have the power to change their conditions.”

‘Dependency Complex’ Among the Poor

Cycles of drought and famine have forced many families to sell their land or use it as collateral for loans at usurious rates. Deo blames Kalahandi’s problems on this concentration of land ownership among a few upper-caste families, as well as on overpopulation, depletion of forest resources, poor crop management and the development of what he terms a “dependency complex” among the poorest people.

Despite his privileged birth, Deo has dedicated himself to battling the vicious caste system that creates neighborhoods where the affluent live alongside the desperately indigent.

“People come here offering charity,” Deo said, “not understanding of our problems.”

Kalahandi’s cases of extreme need exist despite the fact that they are at the center of public attention. Leading politicians, beginning with the late Indira Gandhi in 1965--she became prime minister the next year--have regularly visited here, bringing promises but only short-term relief. Kalahandi has been the subject of countless journalistic exposes. It has been investigated by national and local parliaments, has been probed by human rights commissions and has figured in several important lawsuits.

Despite the spotlight, nothing seems to improve here. People still starve to death in Kalahandi’s sorrowful villages. The district exists in a state of near-permanent famine. If anything, things appear to be getting worse.

“Our situation is hopeless,” said Hitesh Kumar Bagartti, 35, a local official who in some other, less-blighted setting might have served as a model for a brighter future.

“Conditions have deteriorated,” Bagartti said in a gloomy interview conducted by candlelight during a typical evening power failure. “The total system is corrupt. Many people are living in half-starvation. There is no way out.”

Laws Are Often Ignored

Bob Currie, a famine specialist at the University of Huddersfield in England, said Kalahandi’s breakdown appears to have occurred at the state government level.

“In Kalahandi,” Currie reported, “public action has been widely in evidence, designed to place pressure on government to maintain effective programs to combat long-term poverty and hunger. However, the state government appears to have ignored these pressures in many cases.”

Laws exist to protect the mostly tribal population, Currie said, but they are often ignored. Kalahandi is considered a “punishment posting” by the elite Indian civil service, and local administrators seldom bother to learn the local dialect.

State and local politicians, meanwhile, have developed alternative strategies to stay in power.

“For those holding political power,” Currie said, “efforts to enhance relief and administration are only one way of attempting to retain political support.” Instead, local and state campaigns increasingly focus on “rhetoric, promises, discrediting opponents and shaping close links with local elites.”

In 1988, the Orissa High Court directly blamed the state government for several starvation deaths here, charging it with “complete apathy in the matter.” The court findings became the major issue in the 1989 state elections and resulted in the defeat of the incumbent chief minister, J. B. Patnaik.

Blaming ‘Laziness of the People’

The situation in Kalahandi has also figured in subsequent votes, but its power as an election issue, capable of toppling governments, appears to be fading. Proof of this came in 1995, when the Patnaik government--disgraced and humbled after the high court ruling--was returned to power.

Patnaik, emboldened by the reelection, blamed the chronic problems in Kalahandi on “the laziness of the people” and their unwillingness or inability to take advantage of government programs to lift them from poverty.

The conclusion drawn by Currie and other experts is that, on a national level, India’s vibrant democracy has been successful in preventing a recurrence of the catastrophic famines that plagued the country before independence from British colonial rule. However, the democratic system has been largely ineffective in attacking the endemic malnutrition that affects as many as 500 million Indians--nearly half the population--as well as the state of near-permanent starvation that exists here in Kalahandi.

Conditions here also support another point many food experts make: Famine and starvation are ultimately local. Plenty and dearth can exist in the same country, in the same region, even in the same neighborhood. Poverty and education are often more important factors than the quantity of food a country produces.

Green Revolution’s Effects Uneven

On a national level, thanks to the tremendous agricultural advances that began three decades ago, India has largely freed itself from the specter of widespread famine. Punjab and Haryana in the north, Gujarat and Maharashtra in the west and Tamil Nadu in the south have been transformed into lush, productive regions. India has become a net exporter of grain.

But in India, as in many other parts of the developing world, the results of the Green Revolution--which introduced hybrid grain varieties and chemical fertilizers and insecticides--are vastly uneven.

“It was successful in filling some pockets,” said Manoranjan Mohanty, a professor of political science at Delhi University. “But more than two-thirds of India remained outside its reach--including vast belts of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. Those are still undeveloped areas with semi-feudal methods of agriculture.”

The vagaries of the Green Revolution can be seen in prosperous Punjab. In the village of Pipalmajra, Charan Singh, 60, and his family own 20 acres of land planted with wheat, sunflowers, mustard, sugar cane and potatoes. The Sikh farmers have seen their family income increase tenfold, from the equivalent of $2,000 a year in 1970 to more than $20,000 in 1997.

Their new affluence has allowed them many luxuries now common in Punjab. They have a large new main family home, with screened windows and doors to keep out pests, and several smaller houses in the village for 23 other family members. They have a tractor and five motor scooters. A framed photograph of the Golden Temple in Amritsar--Sikhism’s holiest place--is encased in the living room, next to an imported Japanese television set.

“Thirty years ago, this village had no electricity,” said Singh, a strapping man with an impressive flowing white beard and a plaid turban. “We had no electric pumps. We used a bullock to draw water from the well. We all worked every day in the fields, and we basically lived hand to mouth.”

But Singh and his family no longer toil in the fields. They, like many landowners in Punjab, have become gentlemen-farmers, leaving the field work to landless peasants--migrant workers who come here from the impoverished state of Bihar, a two-day train trip away.

“The Biharis started coming here in 1976,” Singh said. “That year, we had one man come who stayed three months. Now we have seven workers.” Although the Singhs could easily afford to rent a modern harvesting machine for their abundant wheat crop, they prefer the manual workers.

“The workers can cut the wheat closer to the ground, and we can use the chaff as fodder,” family member Gurdayal Singh said.

One of the laborers working the fields on the day a reporter visited Pipalmajra was Dasrat Singh, 36, a native of Sitamari in an extremely poor area of Bihar. He and 11 other Biharis wielding short-handled scythes were cutting and bundling rapeseed plants in one of Charan Singh’s fields.

For their day’s labor, the Biharis said they were earning 150 rupees--about $4--to be shared among the 12 workers. In addition, they said, the landowners were providing them with food, a mud house and a pump for bath and cooking water.

Dasrat Singh said he works six months in Punjab and spends the rest of the year in Bihar with his father, wife and four children. He also works the fields in Bihar, and in a good year earns about $300.

“There’s not enough work in Bihar,” he said. “If I didn’t come here to work, my family would not have enough to eat.”

Kalahandi, like Bihar, is beyond the reach of the Green Revolution and its economic prosperity. Nothing--not government irrigation projects, not special housing and food relief programs, not the frequent helicopter visits from the country’s top leaders--appears able to wrench this place from its spiraling descent into hunger.

Last year, at least a dozen people died of starvation or hunger-related complications after a severe summer drought. Officials from the National Human Rights Commission--an independent government watchdog--visited the Kalahandi, Nuapada and Bolangir districts in western Orissa to investigate.

After interviewing villagers and examining medical records, the officials confirmed 12 hunger-related deaths. The still-confidential report, obtained by The Times, is somber reading and suggests a cover-up by local officials.

*

A typical entry in the report concerns Rupobati Patel, 25, of Nuapada:

“Government record indicates that death was due to some ailment, whereas villagers have asserted that she was without food for days. . . . Her father was without job and unable to provide any food for her. Death seems to be due to prolonged undernourishment.”

Another entry describes the case of Sadhu Behera, a male of undetermined age from Bolangir: “Family in state of destitution, totally undernourished. Officials stated that death due to natural cause. Inquiries indicate that death due to prolonged undernourishment.”

India’s top civil servant in the Kalahandi-Nuapada region, Satya Brata Sahu, would not comment on the reported deaths, citing ongoing investigations.

But he did say that his work has been hampered by difficulty in recruiting other civil servants to come here.

“Whoever is posted in this district feels he has been punished,” Sahu said. “When they are assigned to come here, they resign and leave the service.”

Dozens of positions here are unfilled, he said. When he sees former classmates from the civil service academy, their first questions are: “How’s your health? Have you got malaria yet?”

To say that India is poor is to make an observation of no value, author V. S. Naipaul has commented. More underweight and malnourished children can be found in India than in any other country. Sick children, weakened by undernourishment, can be found in the hospitals of New Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore--not just in remote regions.

But nowhere in India are undernourishment and hunger so pervasive as they are here in Orissa. They infect the villages with a halting lethargy some officials have haughtily equated with shiftlessness.

“There is a laziness, definitely, in this area,” Sahu said. “The womenfolk here are very good. But the menfolk will drink and sit all day on the veranda playing cards.”

Barla Baheli is a crumbling village of about 80 households about six miles south of Khariar. In late June, most of the men of the village had gone to the larger cities of Raipur, Nagpur and Bombay seeking work as laborers or bicycle rickshaw drivers.

Pankaja Nag is 7 years old but looks 5. Before the latest drought and food shortage, he was known as a bright boy who did well in school. During a reporter’s visit to Barla Baheli, Pankaja stood under a pipal tree, apart from the crowd of villagers. His legs were swollen with “dropsy.” His head seemed to wobble on his neck. His eyes were dull, his tongue white. When he spoke, his voice was a dry squeak.

*

When asked about food, he began to cry silently. But weeping seemed painful, and he tried to stop. That morning, he said, he had been given some leftover rice by another village family.

The boy’s father, a destitute farmer, had left six months earlier to work in the city and had not been heard from since, the villagers explained. To feed her two children--Pankaja and a 4-year-old girl with a severe cleft palate that opened her face like a ravine--the mother was gathering wood in the hills, hauling water and cleaning cooking utensils.

“The day before yesterday, I made 2 rupees [about 6 cents],” she said. “But today, I have no food to cook. I would beg in the village, but no one has anything to give me.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Littlest Victims

Directly or indirectly, malnutrition is associated with the deaths of more than 6 million children younger than 5 in the world every year. Other effects of undernourishment on youngsters include:

IMPAIRED BRAIN GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT

Iodine and iron deficiency can cause:

* Mental retardation.

* Brain damage.

* Lower IQ.

LIFELONG PHYSICAL DISABILITIES

Folate and vitamin D deficiency can result in:

* Neural-tube defects.

* Poor bone formation.

COMPROMISED IMMUNITY AND CHRONIC DISEASE

Malnutrition impairs the immune system and is linked to later conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure.

Child mortality

The World Health Organization estimates that malnutrition was a factor in more than half of all child deaths in developing nations in 1995.

Malnutrition rates among children

Undernourishment in developing regions s measured by the United Nations Children’s Fund at three levels: stunted (low height for age), underweight (low weight for age) and wasted (low weight for height).

Percentage of children under 5 with symptoms of malnutrition

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

About This Series

At a time when humankind has the resources to conquer hunger, 800 million people are chronically undernourished.

* Monday: International agencies are seeking innovative strategies to combat the problem at its core.

* Tuesday: Nearly 40 years after Maoist ideology led to cataclysmic famine in China, the lessons can be applied to another isolationist, hunger-racked state: North Korea.

* Wednesday: No place in the world suffers more from conflict-born starvation than Africa, where civil war, ethnic bloodletting, coups d’etat and revolution take a tremendous toll.

* Today: Class divisions perpetuate hunger and turn India into a nation of contradictions: Stretches of bountiful land coexist with pockets of utter desperation.

* Friday: Scientists hope dramatic discoveries in plant genetics and biotechnology will produce a second “Green Revolution” that will help feed a swelling world population.