Scribbles of Sol: Hunger free future

"Every 3.4 seconds, somebody dies of hunger"

Damn! This cannot be happening. Yes. This is the first reaction of 9/10 people. We cannot imagine anybody dying of hunger! Hats off to my friend Mukesh who made the above video around 3 years back. Do watch the video if you haven't.

India's performance at the common wealth games was remarkable. The joy of clean sweeping Aussies at home, priceless! "However, another kind of ‘competition’ ranked 84 countries in accordance with achievements in a different field this week. India was a lowly 67th. The field was hunger", said an article in Hindusthan times on 14th October. The report also added "By hosting the Commonwealth Games against all odds, India has shown that with political will, it can overcome problems and find solutions. With 55 million children under five being underweight, we need to show similar leadership to find a solution to the silent epidemic that is quietly wiping out generations of our children”. I then searched for few more articles on the internet and found this interesting piece "India is failing its rural poor with 230 million people being undernourished — the highest for any country in the world. Malnutrition accounts for nearly 50% of child deaths in India as every third adult (aged 15-49 years) is reported to be thin (BMI less than 18.5)." - TOI, feb 09, 2009.

Hunger is not a new problem, especially for the third world countries. Statistics say that over 90% of the starved population is the third world countries. Let us consider India, what could be some of the possible reasons. I searched for the same and found the following "The government of India's grain godowns are bulging with twice as much grain as is required, blocking about Rs4000 crore. More grain rots on Punjab's roadsides waiting for godowns to empty so that new grain can be picked up by the government". "The report said that while general inflation declined from a 13-year high exceeding 12% in July 2008 to less than 5% by the end of January 2009, the inflation for food articles doubled from 5% to over 11% during the same period." These could be some of the possible reasons at a macro level.

When I was still searching, I found this revolutionary, Pulitzer prize winning picture taken by Kevin Carter. This was taken on his trip to Sudan in 1993 when the girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, whereupon a vulture had landed nearby. He wrote that he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn't. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away. The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run a special editor's note saying the girl had enough strength to walk away from the vulture, but that her ultimate fate was unknown. Carter took his own life a year later, and his last words were "I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners..". Imagine how much suffering he would have gone through, had he been alive today.

Is there anything that we can do about it? I found this quote by our father of Nation "There's enough on this planet for everyone's needs but not for everyone's greed." How true. Please do not waste food. Every rice grain few rice grains we waste would have made their day for thousand of people in our own country. We can even take many other precautions like cooking only as much is required or re-distributing the wasted food. Thinking on these lines. I searched for any waste food redistribution organisations in India. I hardly could find any. I found one NGO named "bhookh", and they are doing a phenomenal job. With hunger growing at this rate, we are in urgent need of these organisations, who can reach the needy, who can redistribute the tonnes food left over in parties, marriages etc.

Let us do our part in making this rich nation, truly rich. Because, when politicians can’t do anything, people can! And we as the ultra-educated youth of this nation, definitely can. If little things like these help save the life of a person, why not. Let us spread the message and wipe this silent epidemic of its roots.

Visit this website betterworld.net, which is dedicated to fighting this cause. A quote on the site says "If we are going to stop wars on this earth, we are going to have to make war on hunger our number one priority." - David W. Brooks, member, Presidential Commission on World Hunger..