PRE AND POST CONDITION OF INDIA

India is the second most populous country in the world with an estimated 1.2 billion people
and the third largest economy by GDP, India was classified as a (lower) middle- income
country by the World Bank in 2012. Hunger, Malnutrition, Hidden hunger and poverty all are
related to each other. Poverty is considered to be the main cause of malnutrition and hunger.
During the past decades there has been a remarkable change in the pattern of nutrition-related
problems in India. Looking back, we can see how far we have come. But, looking forward,
we see that the road ahead is long and challenging.

Poverty in India is at peak with the British invasion. The rule of British has driven India into
poverty with extraction of its resources, inflation and several others. For Indians the British
rule was devastating. As colonial extraction intensified, India’s per capita consumption of
food grains collapsed from 210 kilograms per year in the early 1900s down to 157 kilograms
per year by the end of the 1930s – what Patnaik refers to as ‘severe nutritional decline’. The
Bengal famine stands as one of the single most horrific atrocities to have occurred under
British colonial rule. From 1943 to 1944, more than three million Indians died of starvation
and malnutrition, and millions more fell into crushing poverty. For many years, the British
blamed the famine on weather conditions and food shortfalls, as if it were an unavoidable
natural disaster. Today, most researchers agree that the crisis was human-made, triggered
primarily by war-time inflation that pushed the price of food out of reach. During this crisis, a
number of officials in India pleaded with Churchill to send aid, but their requests were
repeatedly refused. Instead, quite the opposite happened: the British government continued to
extract income from India for its own domestic spending, totalling as much as £15 billion
($20 billion), in today’s money, from 1939 to 1944.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the major nutritional diseases prevalent in large sections of the
population were kwashiorkar (acute protein-energy malnutrition), keratomalacia (attributable
to severe vitamin A deficiency), beri-beri (arising from vitamin B1 deficiency) and pellagra
(nicotinic acid deficiency). The banishment of beri-beri is a classic example of a common
sense approach. Over the course of two to three decades, the most florid manifestations of
these malnutrition diseases virtually disappeared. Sometimes unforeseen factors unleashed by
the developmental process have worked tangentially but effectively to help in changing the
epidemiology of nutritional diseases. After Independence in 1947, major famines were no
longer seen, but the threat of starvation still loomed over large sections of the people.
Malnutrition continued to haunt the poor, though there has been a reduction in severity of the
manifestations. Alongside these problems, the population of Independent India surged at a
rate that dwarfed the population growth of the previous 200 years. By the 1960s, India was
faced with fast-emptying grain baskets, and the prospect of having to import food to ward off
famine.

With the timely advent of the Green Revolution, this threat was staved off. Intensive
cultivation of high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat filled the granaries. After the green
revolution, the production of cereal crops tripled with only a 30% increase in the land area
cultivated. This came true all over the world, with a few exceptions. In addition, there were
significant impacts on poverty reduction and lower food prices. Studies also showed that
without the green revolution, caloric availability would have declined by around 11–13%.
These efforts benefitted all consumers in the world, particularly the poor. Although there are
several criticism on Green Revolution, it has no doubt saved India from immense poverty and
increase in food supply.

In order to tackle the on-going malnutrition, there was an increasing focus on the role of
micronutrients during the 1970s to the 1990s. Of course, nutrition scientists even in the
earlier part of the century had seen at first hand the health problems caused by deficiencies of
vitamin A, iron, and iodine. But the roles of other micronutrients such as zinc, folic acid,
magnesium, selenium and vitamin D, among others, in processes ranging from growth and
development of children to the functioning of the immune system started receiving greater
attention. The increasing evidence that micronutrients function synergistically within the
human system, and that stand-alone supplementation of one or the other micronutrient would
have only limited benefits, made it even clearer that only food-based approaches could
achieve nutritional balance in the long run.

TRENDS IN POVERTY IN THE POST REFORM PERIOD

The three conventional measures of poverty, viz, headcount ratio (HCR), poverty gap ratio
(PGR) and Foster-Greer-Thorbecke index (FGT), show substantial poverty reduction during
1970- 2001. The performance is better in urban areas than in rural areas (both in terms of
poverty reduction and smoothness of year-to- year fluctuations). It is noteworthy that all the
poverty measures show that the rural-urban gap in the performance of poverty reduction
further widened in the 1990s (Table 3). The decline in the severity of poverty is faster than
the extent or depth of poverty. For instance, during 1990-2001, while FGT declined at an
annual rate of 7.32 per cent in rural areas and 10.87 per cent in urban areas, PGR declined at
5.25 per cent in rural areas and 7.19 per cent in urban areas and HCR at 3.48 per cent in rural
areas and 4.95 per cent in urban areas. Due to the faster decline of the severity of poverty, the
percentage of very poor also declined at a faster rate than PGR and HCR but the rate is lower
than that of FGT. It is noticeable that the incidence of very poor tracks FGT more closely
compared to HCR and PGR. With the decline in the poverty over the years, the high level of
malnutrition is also considered to decrease in the coming years.

REFERENCES

1) R. Radhakrishna, K. Hanumantha Rao, C. Ravi and B. Sambi Reddy ‘Chronic Poverty

and Malnutrition in 1990s’ Source: Economic and Political Weekly , Jul. 10-16, 2004,
Vol. 39, No. 28 (Jul. 10-16, 2004), pp. 3121-3130.

2) C.Gopalan ‘The Changing Nutrition Scenerio’ , Indian Journal of Medical Research,

Vol 138(3), pp-392-397

3) Sudhakar Dwivedi1 and Pawan Kumar Sharma, ‘Economic scenario of Poverty,

Hunger and Malnutrition in India’, Agro Economist- An International Journal.

4)