It is an irony that India is among largest food producing states in the world. It is also true that our country is at the 102nd position among the 117 qualifying countries, scoring 30.3 in 2019, even lower in the ladder than the countries like Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan. In 2021, these countries performed better than us and that ranked them up. The fact was starvation was an ominous reality even before Covid for us. Our rank had fallen to 27.3. It is a fact that unemployment scenario was swallowing up all optimism and forcing to come down on Food Insecurity conditions.

This leads to malnutrition from early life that spreads over the entire life span, and destroys the youth, maturity and finally dwarfing the evolution of masses themselves. In our country around 80 percent suffer from micronutrient deficiencies. It is the symptom of Hidden hunger. Those standing at the threshold of adulthood are not only those spending labor to create logistics for future life but they are also bearers of next generation. They all need to be fed properly to bring a generation with powerful cognitive capacity, strength to lead the society and country. The demographic advantage cannot be attained if the youth is facing acute malnourishment.

Hunger is a perilous cycle that passes from one generation to the next: Families who struggle with chronic hunger and malnutrition consistently go without the nutrients their minds and bodies need, which then prevents them from being able to perform their best at work, attaining skills, or to improve their lives.

As labour is the resource that constitutes the main source of living for the vast majority of the population, the process of structural change also raises the incomes of workers by reallocating them to higher productivity sectors. If this mechanism is sustained long enough, poverty would automatically decrease, and per capita incomes would also become an order of magnitude higher. Yet most of the welfare steps remain shallow, tilting the advantages towards those who already have. Examples are aplenty. In Covid days, when unemployment and hunger along with the deadly ailment were ruling the roost, masses had not a thread to call their own, there were those like Ambani and Adani for whom the surplus was soaring higher than the normal days.

Most poor countries are characterized by low rates of urbanization and a relatively high weight of agriculture in domestic output (or GDP) and employment. There are the historians writing on these structural shifts associated with industrialization: a movement of the agrarian workforce into more productive opportunities for employment in the manufacturing or service sectors. The economy modernizes by producing goods in demand all over. Informal work and self-employment slowly gets the major share of formal employment, though they still carry the identity of informal labour and output per worker rises. However in India, the entire process has been disrupted since last ten years.

Growth is certainly a necessary requirement for long-run poverty reduction. A natural implication is low growth is less effective than high growth in terms of reducing poverty and this is borne out by India’s experience in the post-liberalization era. However, growth itself is not sufficient. Growth impulses need to transmit across different sectors of the economy, as opposed to being concentrated in urban enclaves where only the relatively well-off benefit. The long-term process of economic development involves not just growth, but is accompanied by structural transformation through which workers move to more productive sectors, specifically from agriculture to manufacturing and services. Of course, public policy plays a role as well. Social safety-net policies can help reduce poverty directly, and expansion of infrastructure, better public services enable the poor to take better advantage of opportunities. But hardly does it happen. Many hungry people live in countries with food surplus, not food shortages. The fact is that the widest section of the masses do not have the access to food, or to the means to procure food, the source of life itself.

It may be underlined here that independent estimates from the Labour Bureau show that wages of rural male workers in agriculture, non-agriculture and construction have been very slow to increase over the entire span of 2014-2023, lagging per capita incomes by a significant margin. But the buck does not stop here. The living standards of women are not the same as men. Disparity is consciously nursed. Sixty percent of the world’s hungry are women and girls. They have to go hungry quite often for days together. And there is no age bar for it, it could be beginning from as early as months. (IPA Service)