A cup of coffee sweetened by jaggery relaxes Muniyammma. With renewed energy she goes back to the field to help transport the just-harvested bundles of ragi from Kaggalipura to the threshing mills.

Some 40km away, in Bangalore, Muniyamma’s sister Jyothi sips a cup of coffee bought at Rs 3 from a roadside vendor. Sweetened with white sugar, the coffee allows her to take a break from carrying stones on a construction site.

Because jaggery has been replaced with refined sugar, Jyothi has unknowingly deprived herself of its rich nutrients. While a kilogram of jaggery has 28 grams of mineral salts — including those of magnesium and calcium — white refined sugar has only 0.3 grams of it per kilogram. This is what happens when women migrate from rural areas to cities. Their diet changes and with it eating patterns, which leads to hunger and malnutrition.

When Sunitha — a resident of Saluhunse on Kanakapura Road — is not attending the local government school, pulls out juicy radishes from the fields — where her parents work — and sells them on the highway. Between sales, she and her friends munch on locally-grown groundnuts or corn.

In Parvayanapalya, 65-year-old Kaalamma dries home-grown chillies in the mild winter sun. Her grandchildren have just had a meal of ragi mudde. Kaalamma has just chased away a broker, who wants her to sell her land to him.

“All of us in this village have been advised to vacate our land. Why doesn’t the government understand that we do not want money? For today’s meal, we used ragi, onions, greens and even some of the spices that have been grown right here on our land. If we move away from the fields, how can we earn enough to buy all these ingredients?” she asks.

Kaalamma’s granddaughter, a graduate who lives with her parents in Bangalore, agrees: “Many people have moved away from our village to cities, in search of better jobs. Some of them are doing quite well. But most of them are in menial jobs, cowering under their masters’ gaze, eating leftovers”.

According to UNICEF, India has higher levels of malnourished children than Sub-Saharan Africa, despite having more funds and better infrastructure to tackle the problem.

“The city may give migrants enough to eat, but not enough to feed their hunger,” says Vanaja Ramprasad, director of Green Foundation. Following a hunger mapping survey in 23 villages in Kanakapura taluk, researchers found that the total earnings in these areas are barely sufficient to cover food expenses.

Despite a number of organisations working in the agricultural sector to improve conditions for farmers, 40 per cent of women agricultural labourers migrate to urban areas every year. For most of them, their food patterns, eating habits and mindsets are altered forever.

“If agriculture fails, the nation fails,” says V Prakash, Director of Central Food Technological Research Institute, Mysore. “Why do we need water-parks and resorts in prime agricultural land? When poor farmers sell off their land to realtors, they actually sell off their livelihood.”

One answer to food security is to link informal food processing centres to organised food processing centres with the involvement of the farmer, grower and the producer. “We seldom tend to feel that the farmer is also an entrepreneur,” he says.