Ash in the Belly : Indias Unfinished Battle Against Hunger By Harsh Mander

Ash in the Belly is a penetrating account of men, women and children living with hunger, illuminated by their courage in trying to cope and survive. It is simultaneously an investigation into the political economy of hunger whereby one in every two children is malnourished despite the creation of wealth and economic growth. Mander critically examines the increasing economic inequalities, the range of State failures and public indifference, in general, and brings out how they have contributed to creating this grim situation. While doing so, he argues passionately for the passage of a universal right to food law which guarantees food to all persons not as State benevolence but as a legal entitlement. Ash in the Belly : Indias Unfinished Battle Against Hunger

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This is an excellent book in many ways. I have worked in the field of nutrition, have travelled in villages, have walked the streets with my camera, and have seen hunger on the streets of India. However, I have not experienced hunger.

What Harsh Mander does very well, is that he clearly highlights the issues, and he gives voice to the stories of those who experience hunger every day. This is something that most of us cannot imagine. I have seen cruelty on the streets, I have seen a little girl who's eye was put out because she was not bringing in enough money for her master, and she did not have a voice.

The sadness, as Harsh points out, is that in our rush to gain wealth, we have also gained indifference to the plight of the starving millions of India. The statistics are revealing in themselves, but his stories really bring the statistics to life.

A bit more detail on his personal recommendations would have been very nice. However, I think that this book is essential reading in India's schools, so that we can sensitize our young at an early stage to what we need to do to really move our country forward. Paperback one of the best books ever Paperback This is a well researched book which demonstrates the problems and reasons why India continues to struggle with hunger, poverty, the caste system, people with disabilities, the elderly, medical care, religion (specifically Muslim), and women's rights.

While they have taken steps to feed the hungry and employ the impoverished, there is much corruption, made easy by a decentralized system of distribution and control. The covering up of the number of people who continue to die each day of starvation related deaths only serves to perpetuate the problem. This is a very sad book and difficult to get through. I wish there was something I could do to alleviate the hunger and suffering of all these people. Paperback

Unless you are a completely self absorbed member of India's westernized, urban, alienated, this-country-stinks elite determined to get ahead at any cost with no limits on who you will trample underfoot to get to where you want to get, Harsh Mandar is mandatory prescribed text! Ash in the Belly is an outstanding symposis of the reach, nature, causes and consequences of hunger in India and you would want to read it even if it was badly written, which manifestly this book is not.

Harsh Mandar is a very good writer: he is pithy and conversational at the same time, and he has also tried to help the poor in India in every which way he could including but not limited to writing edits for Hindustan Times (Today Feb 4th, 2013), filing petitions before the Supreme Court of India and fighting for the right to food security law, a battle he is losing by the way. For these reasons alone, he needs your contribution by way of book royalties.

That said, there are a great many more reasons than that to read this book. His writing skills get the reader through a subject that is basically less than sensational in a way that the reader easily understands the central issues.

You cannot give such a book less than four stars. And you cannot NOT read the book even if the subject of other people dying of hunger is not of interest to you. Paperback This book is an empathetic narration of people and their lives deprived of their basic right to food. As food insecurity and hunger continue to plague India and much has been debated based on Global Hunger Index (GHI) with denialism as a usual response, it is time for India to think beyond ‘fiscal discipline’ to ensure basic public services for her population. The proponents of the free market would argue that the State should not provide entitlements at the expense of others’ tax money. However, Harsh Mander rightly argues that these rights-based public services in education, healthcare, and food security are preliminary investments for the upbringing of a future generation capable of providing both growth and prosperity in the long term.

Amartya Sen in his famous work ‘Poverty and Famines’ defined the entitlement approach as “the set of alternative commodity bundles that a person can command in a society using the totality of rights and opportunities that he or she faces”. Conventional wisdom asserts that people who perish during famines die of starvation due to inadequate food consumption. In Poverty and Famines, Sen writes about people being “plunged into starvation” when their entitlement to food collapses. This analysis of hunger and starvation is the basis of Harsh Mander’s work, in which he argues that when the intensity of food deprivation is on the rise and the repositories of Food Corporation of India (FCI) are filled with grains above the threshold limit, it is unfair and anti-poor to utilize the grains for ethanol blending or to export them as livestock feed.

Jean Dreze had earlier documented the fallacies in ‘targeting the poor’ where people at the bottom strata of society were left behind if they do not fall within the criteria set for the poverty line. If we assume a scenario where a person earning below Rs. 75 a day is considered below the poverty line, the rest of the population that makes above 75 (but below a considerable value to live an ordinary life) would be left out of the Public Distribution System (PDS). Simultaneously, this has also paved the way for high levels of inter-state migration where poor who were cut off from PDS move to other states to fulfill their basic needs, often taking up menial jobs, further depriving their children of acquiring education and access to nutrition. Harsh Mander advocates universal PDS as a remedy to tackle this problem. Destitute, beggars, street children, physically handicapped, migrants, and other deprived classes are among the many entangled in this faulty targeting practice.

Normal Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution once said, “Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world. You cannot build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.” Even though the Indian Constitution places this moral right on a pedestal by instilling the right to food under Article 21 (right to life with dignity) and Article 47 (the State shall endeavor to raise the nutritional levels), the enforcement of this requires a binding commitment from the State that has to prioritize food security. Prescribing Tamil Nadu as a model state in the successful implementation of universal PDS, where the middle class’s stake in public services had ensured the maintenance of quality, Harsh Mander emphasizes that, if the bottom strata of the society are powerless to demand and secure quality services from the State, it must be the ethical obligation of the middle class and the wealthy to acknowledge the intrinsic value of every human being and steer the public policy towards universal public distribution to expunge hunger. Paperback This was a very small book to begin with and every chapter was strewn with narratives of heart wrenching stories of hunger induced death, so that was bit of a dampener as I was looking at more of factual and data filled substantiation of the book's contention.

Now, don't get me wrong, Mr. Mander does a good job presenting the data too but not enough to justify the weight this book carried - to provide an unequivocal supporting argument for FSB. Unfotunately, in my humble opinion it fell short by a little. A four star nevertheless for the effort. Paperback Harsh Mander puts forward a passionate account of the hopelessness, indignity and despair that most of our population goes though everyday in the face of hunger. He starts each chapter with a real-life account which makes us understand the issue as more than merely statistics and numbers. Some are stark images of sleeping hungry:
‘Half the week we are able to eat roti or rice with either vegetable or dal. The other half, it is just roti, or rice boiled with salt and turmeric. But there are four or five days in a month when there is no food, and we have little option except to fast. If there is any food, we give it to our children, adding a lot of water to fill their stomachs. Any additional food goes to our men folk, because we women are used to staying hungry'.
Mander talks about the state failure, inadequacy of existing support and public indifference as augmenting the problem. He shows that despite the much applauded economic growth of the country, hunger is a persistent problem such that it has become inter-generational.The reasons are given as the arbitrary manner in which government surveys attempt to identify those who can be eligible for food subsidies; a corrupt distribution system that leads to leakages (of nearly 39 percent); and a culture of subversion of minorities including Dalits, Muslims, leprosy patients, women and female children.
Mander not only displays the physiological aspect of hunger that are faced (chronic diseases and malnutrition), but goes deeper to portray the psychological effects of hopelessness, shame, loneliness and low self-esteem that goes with an empty belly.
Mander thus authoritatively argues in favor of the right to food security as a part of right to life with dignity. He stresses on the aspect of legal entitlement that goes along with the Right, instead of it being a part of welfare that is doled out as state benevolence. The part where he talks about state and public indifference as being the cause of someone dying of hunger as not being very different from murder- a crime- touched me the most.
Its a must-read, particularly for all of us who have never felt the loneliness and shame associated with sleeping on a hungry stomach for days together and will never wake up to the wails and cries of our hungry children at night. It provides a more intrusive commentary on an issue we usually look from a distanced and detached manner. Paperback An insightful read! Paperback