Ecological Poverty: The New Serial Killer in India
The world of Indian policymakers is stoutly murderous. The current spate of malnutrition deaths in various parts of the country is just an enforcement of it. During July and September 20 this year, children died primarily due to malnutrition in Rajasthan’s Baran district. In Maharashtra’s Nandurbar and Orissa’s Nabrangpur and Malkangiri districts, death continues to stalk its tribal residents. Every day 16 children die in Maharashtra of malnutrition. The state health department records reveal that nearly 9,000 children under the age of six have died directly or indirectly of malnutrition in tribal areas of Maharashtra since last year. The state government is in a denial mood.
In Orissa recently 12 children have died but the state government refused to accept that they died of malnutrition. This is not restricted to death only. In the last week of September 2004, a mother of a four-month-old child had to sell the baby in Dhanbad, Jharkhand for less than a thousand rupees to buy some food grains only. According to her father, she was driven by abject poverty and suffering from malnutrition. Why do children of such resource-rich districts die of chronic hunger and malnutrition and why a mother has to sell her baby for some food? The fact is that we have grossly failed to recognise the disease called ‘ecological poverty’ that has killed close to a thousand children under the age of six in just two months. Malnutrition is the terminal stage of this disease. Going by the near chronic death rate the disease has taken epidemic proportions in India. It is a pointer to how ecological poverty – that is the lack of access to natural resources like land and forests – can trigger catastrophe in the ecology-based village system in India.
The government’s myopic interpretation of the problem just makes it fatal. It is observed that poor sections of society largely depend on their immediate environment than on the national economy. They are unlikely to benefit from the grand development projects that primarily degrade their surroundings on the ground. At this juncture, ecological poverty sets in with restricted access to natural resources, which also form the staple food basket. It is due to two primary reasons: laws that keep away people from forests and ecological degradation that brings down per capita natural resources availability. With the fast depletion of food pools like forests and lands, food scarcity has badly hit tribal districts solely dependent on it for their food needs. Long spells of food scarcity leave women and children malnourished, the first victims of environmental degradation. Once malnourished both children and mothers become prone to various diseases. Then follows the uncontrolled spat of malnutrition deaths. In tribal belts of India, as agriculture contributes very little, forest remains a major source of food for the inhabitants. Thus less access to forests has grievously affected their food security. Nandurbar was densely forested and its lands were fertile a few years ago. It was a food-sufficient district in Maharashtra. However, the residents were constantly being kept away from the already depleting forests. The depleted forests caused soil erosion leading to low agricultural yield.
On the other hand in Orissa’s forested Nabrangpur district the village, from where a maximum number of malnutrition deaths have been reported, has been denied all amenities as it is a forest village thus outside the revenue administration’s welfare schemes. Also, the forest department doesn’t allow the residents access to the forests for food gathering terming the village as an ‘illegal settlement.’ The malnourished districts, altogether 250 in India, have been targeted for nutrition enhancement programmes since the 1970s. But again these programmes treat the symptoms rather than the disease. In 1995-96 when a severe drought hit Maharashtra, it was obvious that without access to forest and agricultural lands, the tribal population would perish of malnutrition. Close to a thousand children died that year. The government then declared a nutrition enhancement programme to forget it immediately.
After five years, again, the government is promising now to revive it with more budgetary allocation. Giving more access to food resources like the forests could have done nutrition enhancement. But the government wants to distribute food to attain so. It is a matter of concern that in densely populated countries like India, where people are using every possible ecological niche, environmental degradation will lead to increased impoverishment. Up till now, no government programme has ever incorporated local ecological security as its objective. And without ecological security in these districts food security can never be attained. The government’s insistent denial that children died of malnutrition is a clinical approach to a huge human and ecological crisis. It is time for the chain reaction of ecological poverty to be controlled.