This thread should not be taken as “anti-India”, or India-bashing. But just wanted to share the ethical/moral status of a society in 21st century world, in a high-tech country like India.
Does the technology, investment, education bring benefits to “country”? What good does it bring to a country when one part is partying while other is starving? The technology, science couldn’t make people more “humane”, what good is education?
**India: hunger rules in a land of surpluses **
By Luke Harding
BARAN: When the crops failed and there was no work, the villagers of Mundiar began searching for food in the jungle.
They didn’t find any. Instead, they found grass. And so for most of the summer, the village’s 60 households got by eating sama - a fodder normally given to cattle. But humans are not supposed to eat grass and soon, the villagers, their cheeks increasingly sunken, got weaker. They complained of constipation and lethargy. Finally, they started dying.
One villager, Murari, watched his entire family slowly succumb. First his father, Ganpat, died, followed by his wife Bordi. Four days later, he lost his daughter.
“My daughter was lying on the floor of my hut. Her body suddenly started shaking. The shaking stopped. I tried to wake her up. But she was dead. I buried her in the jungle,” Murari, a 25-year-old labourer, whose mother died next, said.
Across this remote part of north India - once covered in dense green forest but now made barren by drought - it is the same story.
Over the past two months more than 40 members of the tribal Sahariya community have starved to death. Their deaths could be explained if 21st century India was more like southern Africa - a place prone to famine. But it isn’t.
Some 60 million surplus tons of grain are currently sitting in government warehouses. This is, by any standards, a large food mountain.
Campaigners point out that stacked on top of each other, the sacks of wheat would stretch to the moon.
Unfortunately, none of them reached Mundiar or any of the other more remote interior villages in south-eastern Rajasthan.
In the village of Bhoyal, three hours’ drive from Baran, the nearest big town, across a shimmering landscape of green eucalyptus trees and red-brown earth, the evidence of chronic malnutrition is not hard to spot.