JOIN USFighting hunger with seeds and roots
If it were not for her older son, who is all of 13 years, Sarasmati Majhi from Bahadulki village of Kashipur block in Odisha’s Rayagada district, would not have been able to keep her family of five children alive.
The boy has been taken out of school and now herds cattle in an adjoining village.
For this, he gets a kilo of rice and two kilos of millet a month. His mother stretches out this small reserve to feed the family for at least 10 days.
For the rest of the time she has to take recourse to “starvation food” like mango kernels, tamarind seeds, mushrooms and the roots and leaves of wild plants.
Sarasmati, 35, an adivasi widow, lives in Odisha’s hunger belt. It is for people like her that measures like the Food Security Bill are being contemplated in distant Delhi. Yet, so far, her situation has remained unchanged.
With empty eyes and a visage marked by years of malnutrition and hopelessness, she says, “I know that my children need to eat better than the gruel of tamarind seeds. But what can I do? We need to fill our stomachs in some way, don’t we?”
She would like to go out and earn some money but her children are too young to be left alone.
Starvation has already claimed one member of the family, rendering it even more vulnerable. In 2010, Majhi’s husband Bipin succumbed to what a government report describes as “diarrhoea” but she suspects that it was the watery gruel prepared by boiling millets with mango kernel that had laid him low.
Kashipur block has 17 panchayats and 704 villages, with a population of 1,01,541, out of which 60,402 are adivasis (tribals) and 20,767 are Dalits. Over 85 per cent of people here live below the poverty line (BPL) and practice rain-fed agriculture. For them rice is almost a luxury.
Every household tries to hoard its reserves of rice for as long as possible by resorting to supplementary fare like ‘gurudi saag’ (leaves from the forests), tamarind seeds, wild mushrooms and roots.
The hungriest period is during the monsoon because wage employment is generally unavailable and the fields are flooded. This is when some households are driven to even subsisting on grass and many like Majhi use mango kernels they have preserved for the really lean days. To prepare this, mango kernels are first collected and dried. They are then ground and stored as flour. When required, gruel is made of this substance and eaten.
Trouble is that this gruel can also turn extremely toxic. Explains Bidyut Mohanty, a social activist who has been working on Right to Food issues in Koraput and Rayagada districts, “The severe food shortage during the rainy season, combined with the shortage of dry firewood, leads people here to cook large quantities of food —sometimes for four to five days at a stretch.
This food, if kept for a few days, turns fungus-ridden and poisonous, and could cause what is termed as a ‘starvation death’ or death through cholera or diarrhoea.”
According to Dr S Kar, who is the director of the Regional Medical Science and Research Institute, Bhubaneswar, mango kernels have carbohydrates required by the human body. But when it is preserved under unhygienic conditions, it could cause fatalities.
The same holds true for food items made from mushrooms, roots and tamarind seeds that the tribal communities routinely store.
The authorities have made attempts to warn the local community about the dangers of ingesting such fare. Reveals Lachma Nag, another resident of Bahadulki village, “Last year, when seven people died because of diarrhoea in this village, the BDO (block development officer) distributed some rice and warned us not to eat mango kernels.
But once he left, nobody came back to ensure that we were supplied regularly with foodgrain. So we have no option but to eat what we could lay our hands on. The situation today is the same as it was last year, and the year before.”
There are currently four major government schemes that are aimed at food security for Odisha’s poor: The Public Distribution System (PDS), the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), the Mid-day Meal Scheme and, most importantly, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA).
According to Odisha’s Panchayati Raj minister, Maheswar Mohanty, the implementation of the MNREGA in the state has been quite effective. He claims that in 2009-2010, 85,000 people completed 100 days work, which went up to 200,000 in 2010-11.
But Kashipur’s experience seems to belie his claim. People here still have the two basic complaints they have always had: Lack of wage employment and poor access to foodgrain from the PDS.
As Roini Nag, 40, of Pipalpadar village in Kashipur block squats in her hut skinning tamarind seeds that will then be pounded and stored for the family because work is scarce and so is food, she says, “Here everything, especially food and work, is scarcely available. We are surrounded by hills and a rough terrain. This means we may have job cards but no jobs. I don’t know why the government issues these cards to us. What is the benefit of the card if I haven’t got a single day’s work so far?”
It’s the same with BPL cards. Foodgrain from the PDS is available only once in three months. “So even if we have BPL cards, we are forced to take three months’ quota at a time when we don’t have the money to pay for it. It costs at least Rs 50 to buy 25 kilos rice at one go, and where do we have such money. So we end up foregoing our entitlements and settling for stuff like tamarind seeds,” says Nag.
According to the World Food Programme about one billion people are going to bed hungry every day across the globe, including 350 million people in India. Many of them live right here in Odisha. They bear names like Sarasmati, Lachma and Bagbati and struggle every day to satiate the hunger of their children in any way they can.