Jean Dreze On How India Can Fight Food Insecurity

Brut India

Economist and activist Jean Dreze has been speaking about the lack of a nutritious diet for India’s poor for a long time. He was detained recently for organising a gathering in Jharkhand where starvation deaths are fairly frequent.

Transcript

00:00There's no country in the world, not Niger, not Mali, not Nepal, not Somalia,

00:05that has a larger proportion of underweight children as India.

01:00There's no country in the world, not Niger, not Mali, not Nepal, not Somalia,

01:06that has a larger proportion of underweight children as India.

01:09Same, more or less the same picture if you look at stunting rates, if you look at

01:13deprivation of micronutrients like, you know, iron deficiency,

01:18vitamin A, in all these respects, India is pretty much at the rock bottom.

01:23Now one reason for that which is fairly obvious is, you know, what I've just

01:27shown, that a nutritious diet is just beyond the reach of large numbers of people.

01:32I mean, if you were to replace this basket with what people actually need for a healthy living,

01:37you know, some eggs, bananas, diversity of vegetables and milk and so on,

01:42and provision for children and all that, it would just be way beyond the poverty line.

01:47So I think huge numbers of people just cannot afford a nutritious diet.

01:50That's one part of it.

01:52I think, but I think it's just one part of the fact that

01:55basically all the enabling factors are missing.

01:57You know, purchasing power is missing, women's empowerment, education, time is missing,

02:04public health care facilities are missing,

02:06child nutrition programs are missing, and that's the end of that whole process.

02:10Well, I think there are many lessons from the more progressive states,

02:13starting of course with Kerala, which has been well recognized for a long time

02:17for its progressive social policies and the outcomes of these progressive social policies.

02:22And more recently, other states like, for example, Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh,

02:26which have really shown that you don't have to wait to be rich

02:30to confront these mass deprivations, nutrition, food insecurity, poor health,

02:35illiteracy. I mean, you can actually really do something.

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