For Bhaskar Kumar it is a struggle to name green leafy vegetables found in India for his homework, because his staple diet is rice and salt, with vegetables served only on festive occasions.
However, the eight-year-old from Pilakhana village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh decides not to ask his mother, Shakuni Bai, aware she skipped dinner four times that week.
Bai is among 194 million Indians going hungry daily, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said — despite India wasting food worth about US$14 billion a year, according to government figures.
India, one of the world’s largest food producers, is trying to tackle waste during production, processing, retailing and consumption by funding internal initiatives and by partnerships on best practice and technology with overseas investors.
However, many of those struggling to get enough to eat are concerned that progress is too slow in India, which ranked 100 among 119 countries in last year’s Global Hunger Index, with 14.5 percent of the population undernourished.
Bai said her problems getting food came when three years of inadequate rainfall were followed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “demonetization,” when two of the highest denomination notes were scrapped in November 2016.
“I had my own land where I used to grow rice and wheat alternately, but with three years of consecutive drought I mortgaged my land to pay the mounting debt,” Bai, 42, said during an interview at her mud-and-brick hut in Pilakhana.
“I decided to give myself a last chance and was planning to pay the mortgage by farming as the forecast suggested good rain in the coming months, but then demonetization happened. The little money I had saved to buy seeds became worthless,” she said, adding that by the time she changed her notes the price of seed had soared.
Bai now works as a laborer, earning 120 rupees (US$1.89) a day, which is not enough to support her family of eight that includes five children.
MORE THAN ENOUGH
The paradox of millions going hungry in India while food goes to waste is receiving increasing amounts of attention as the FAO stresses that one-third of food produced globally for human consumption is wasted every year.
As the World Economic Forum has highlighted, food production is clearly not the main issue as India needs between 225 million tonnes and 230 million tonnes of food per year to feed its population — and farm output between 2015 and 2016 hit more than 270 million tonnes.
Former Indian minister of agriculture Sharad Pawar once told parliament that about 40 percent of the value of annual production was wasted, with crops left to rot in the sun without storage or transportation, or eaten by insects and rats.
This wastage has a knock-on effect on the environment as well, as the efforts made to produce this generates greenhouse gases, uses water and can lead to deforestation.
However, while India’s Amul, the world’s largest dairy cooperative, has been widely praised for successfully processing huge amounts of milk quickly and safely for years, spurring the so-called “White Revolution” in India, authorities have struggled to stop vast amounts of grain being wasted every year.
The Food Corp of India (FCI), the nation’s main grain procurement agency, which was set up about 50 years ago, now sits on mounds of rice and wheat and has faced criticism for being too weighed down by process and bureaucracy to solve the problem.
A report by the Indian government’s Comptroller and Auditor General published last year involved a detailed analysis on shortcomings of the FCI, including wastage, misappropriation and fraudulent payments.
A FCI official, who wished to remain anonymous, said a key reason for food waste is damage caused by a lack of infrastructure, which it is trying to overcome by investing in building new cold-storage facilities over the next five years.
CHILDREN STUNTED
However, while this food is wasted, millions of people are going hungry, with 38.4 percent of children under the age of five stunted, the Global Hunger Index said.
“This reflects the chronic lack of balanced food,” said Ashish Agarwal, a food rights activist with Aligarh-based non-profit group UDAAN Society that focuses on rural development. “The under-five mortality rate is 4.8 percent in India, partially because of inadequate nutrition and an unhealthy environment.”
Critics are concerned that it is not enough to just focus on boosting grain storage, as 350 million of India’s 1.3 billion people live in rural locations where electricity is unreliable and erratic, so the use of cold storage facilities is limited.
They want to see improved transportation to move food supplies faster, and faster food processing so less is wasted.
Raghav Rajan, a farmer from Chakwas village in western Rajasthan state, shies away from government storage, saying traditional storage methods are better to preserve food.
“We store fruits and vegetables with Neem leaves [a medicinal herb], which act as a pest resistant agent. We also use dry chillies to kill any insects infecting the grains,” Rajan said, talking in a field near his house.
He prefers to do this because the 1,900 or so storage facilities built by the government around the nation are mostly city-based and using them incurs transport costs, he said.
“Moreover, there is no surety that our crops won’t rot in these facilities,” he added.
TECHNOLOGY
However, the Indian government has said it is trying to stop food losses and address hunger in various ways, including changing distribution strategies and using technology.
The Indian Ministry of Food Processing Industries is working with private sector companies to provide pre-cooling and chilled storage from the farm to the consumer, with about 228 projects underway by August last year.
Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare Secretary Shobhana Pattanayak said the government distributes excess grain through a public distribution system.
Under this system the government buys food grain from farmers and distributes it at subsidized prices to the poor, selling wheat and rice at between 2 rupees and 3 rupees per kilogram compared with the market price of between 12 rupees and 13 rupees.
However, the system has come under fire from some locals who say the supplies and their quality can be erratic with grain from the distribution system being siphoned off by middlemen who sell it at a higher prices than the market rate.
“The superior quality food grains are sold in the black market by middlemen and the bad quality wheat and rice is given to us at a subsidized rate,” Pilakhana village leader Ali Sher said. “A small quantity of good quality rice is mixed with a rotten portion to increase the volume and it is sold to us at subsidy. It is better to starve than to eat rodent-infested food.”
Aligarh Muslim University Faculty of Agricultural Sciences professor Sagheer Ahmed said a lack of storage is the main reason for wasted food grain along with no concrete system for processing perishable fruits and vegetables.
“There is also a huge communication gap between farmers and scientists and ... they fail to benefit from the technologies developed by us,” Ahmed said.
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