Many parts of India today are as hungry as they were during the early, terrible days of the Bengal famine and the Second World War, writes economist Utsa Patnaik

In the course of the last five years (1998-2003), the population of the Republic of India has been sliding down towards sharply lowered levels of per capita foodgrains absorption, levels so low in particular years that they have not been seen for the last half century. Between the early 1990s when economic reforms began, and at present, taking three-year averages, the annual absorption of foodgrains per head has come down from 178 kg to 155 kg. Such low absorption levels were last seen in the initial years of World War II — from where they had fallen further still. Again, after some recovery, the very first few years after Independence half-a-century ago and the food crisis of the mid-1960s, are comparable to present average absorption levels.

Over four-fifths of the total fall in the 1990s, has taken place in the last five years alone, from 174 kg in the three years ending in 1998 to 155 kg taking the average of the two pre-drought years. This steep and unprecedented fall in foodgrains absorption in the last five years has entailed a sharp increase in the numbers of people in hunger, particularly in rural areas, and for very many it has meant starvation. The average downward movement in turn is the outcome of divergent trends — foodgrains absorption is rising fast for the mainly urban well-to-do, and is either the same or falling faster than the average for the bulk of the mainly rural population.

This phenomenon of increasing numbers in hunger can be established both on the basis of the hardest and the most reliable data (on output, trade and stocks) that we have from official ground-level experience of individual researchers and of organisations working in rural areas. The phenomenon is completely independent of the recent drought, and indeed the lowest levels of foodgrains absorption to date, has been registered two years before the severe drought of 2002-03.