Guest post by AGRIMA BHASIN and ASHWIN PARULKAR.

The watchdog metaphor obliges the media to step up their role, that of an opinion maker, and stir public opinion on hunger and food security in India

A priest turned beggar, his body starved thin; a family of destitute potters picking up grains soiled in mud; emaciated women forced into sex work; and a man scavenged by dogs and vultures. These were just a few of the scores of starving people journalist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya drew in black and white sketches in his travels through Bengal’s Midnapore district during the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, the last of a spate of famines that plagued colonial India during British rule. Bhattacharya’s portraits of the destitute ’showed’ stories of mass starvation, making visible through withering human flesh a nearly immeasurable tragedy of more than 3 million hunger deaths. Brutal yet compassionate, his graphic chronicles provoked the ire of colonial administrators, prompting officials to burn every copy of his book, Hungry Bengal (1943).

Despite the censorship of his book, Bhattacharya continued to report on the famine for the Communist Party of India’s weekly newspaper, The People’s War. His sustained efforts to bring the realities of mass hunger to bear on the public conscience in colonial, famine-struck Bengal set a precedent for journalists to use the press as a watchdog that can impel the government to act. Today, his reportage is instructive for those in the profession who particularly cover hunger, poverty and inequality.

In today’s India, home to over 200 million chronically hungry and malnourished people, a significant but small number of dedicated editors, publishers, journalists, photographers and broadcasters are taking strides to highlight the complex nature of inequality in this country. A sporadic renewal of interest on the part of the media to report on hunger and starvation often only occurs in moments of crisis: starvation deaths, children’s deaths, or spoilage of grains in warehouses.

It is possible that the fast pace at which news is reported and consumed today – and the deadlines that journalists have to meet – conflicts with the level of analysis and time required to effectively report the depth of hunger in India. Indeed, in the wake of commercialisation, flashy headlines, provocative commentary, and the entertainment value of divisive debates on television between adversaries, editors may not prioritize analysis questioning the ethical and practical dilemmas of implementing public policies to tackle chronic hunger, starvation, and malnutrition.

The coverage of the National Food Security Bill (NFSB) in March 2013 budget session of the Indian Parliament illustrated how the television news channels, while not engaging with the key provisions in the food bill, prioritized the political disruptions that occurred in Parliament: opposition parties stalled parliamentary proceedings over the Government’s role in the illegal allocation of coal blocks, preventing a discussion on the NFSB, and eventually its passage. Outlets also focused heavily on the economic costs of the proposed food bill. Two instructive newsroom debate titles were ‘Is the food security bill a fiscal nightmare?’ and ‘Politics over food security bill?’

There was little debate on the actual content of the legislation, which seeks to guarantee two-thirds of the population the right to subsidised foodgrains and nutrition services for mothers and children. The Supreme Court had set precedents for the right to food in the 2001 case through the conversion of social protection programs into rights for poor people. Secondly, the National Advisory Council – a team of social and economic policy experts that advise the Prime Minister on public policies – recommended a range of important provisions in their July 2011 draft bill that were scrapped.  Most notably, the mechanisms and duties of local officials to identify people living in starvation and key definitions such as malnutrition, starvation, starvation death, and food security that appeared in the NAC draft were removed. While media outlets highlighted economic arguments of corporate naysayers who dismissed the food bill as an expensive ‘dole’ or a set of ‘freebies’, none raised issue with the painful costs of living with hunger and malnutrition.

There was also little attempt by the national media to strive for a multi-dimensional understanding of food security in India.  In their 2009 re-election campaign, the ruling UPA government had agreed to pass a food bill that would address the diverse barriers poor people face in accessing food. In a country that has achieved four decades of agricultural surplus but is still home to the largest number of hungry people in the world, it was understood that the challenges to the poor in securing food were functions of rising food prices, erroneous targeting of poor into ‘priority’ and ‘general’ groups for bureaucratic simplicity, and corruption in government programs. The food security law was therefore conceived as a human rights law meant to overcome these challenges so that the vulnerable poor are sufficiently nourished.

The stage was therefore set – and still is –to ask ‘what does the right to food mean in India? What would such a right mean for a poor and chronically malnourished person who may currently be too debilitated to work, go to school, or live a healthy life? Who are these people, how do they live, and what are some of the problems they face in accessing food? How does the possibility of the right to food relate to Constitutional rights such as the right to health, right to work, right to education and the right to a dignified life? How is the ongoing right to food case and the proposed food bill relevant to national poverty reduction measures and the government’s stated ‘inclusive growth’ model? How did the Case and the proposal of a food law mobilize a whole section of India’s civil society, like the Right to Food Campaign network?  Who are the people advocating for the right to food at the national and grassroots level, and in the courts, and how do the proactive orders of the Supreme Court relate to a legislation that has these issues at heart?

Why did such nuances, so central to a historic legislation, fail to enter public discourse?  The bill was tabled in Parliament in December 2011.  But it was held in cold storage until March 2013 and has now only been activated through an executive ordinance issued by the Prime Minister in early July 2013.  The lack of constructive debate and discussion on food security in the Parliament paralleled the shallow analysis and scant coverage of chronic hunger and malnutrition on national television and, save for a few exceptions, in major newspapers. This was unfortunate because a consistent and rigorous examination of the issues balanced with stories of people forced to live in subhuman conditions for want of food may have ushered forth a kind of public discourse that initiated effective public action. The fact that this did not happen is also regrettable because the historic right to food case came about after journalists in Rajasthan and other states reported starvation deaths at a time when food grains were rotting in government warehouses.

While a few magazine and newspaper editors and journalists are pushing the envelope to play a socially responsible role, the potential remains untapped in an India that has the largest number of newspaper subscriptions in the world and, arguably, some of the world’s most complex manifestations of poverty and socio-economic inequalities. The good news is that the infrastructure, to a large extent, is in place for journalists to show and question the state of human suffering, which mandates urgent and accurate government action in this country. In order to create the kind of discourse needed for this to happen, there has to be a genuine attempt by the national media to give names, stories, and faces to these problems or the ‘losers’, Press Council of India Chairman, Markandey Katju, asserts will be “the people of India and the millions suffering deprivation.’

Some local language newspapers in India, however, such as the Hindi daily Dainik Jagaran, have staff reporters in districts of poor states like Bihar and Jharkhand whose beat is hunger and poverty. They face considerable challenges. They are based in remote corners of India where resources and protection are scarce. They risk their lives to log stories that are unfavourable to the local political elite: starvation deaths and the violation of poor peoples’ rights to food. Since the poorest districts in India also have high rates of illiteracy, these journalists also face the challenge of limited possibilities of public mobilization in an environment where most of the people afflicted with hunger and human rights violations cannot read the newspaper.

In 1946, months away from ‘self rule’, the representatives of the Constituent Assembly of India met to deliberate a constitution that would guarantee fundamental political and civil freedoms to its citizens. The framers viewed endemic poverty – not merely the lack of political enfranchisement – as the greatest obstacle to India’s freedom.  Jawarhalal Nehru believed that the ‘first task of the Assembly” was “to free India through a new constitution to feed the starving people…” His words are relevant in an India that is home to more poor people today than at the time of independence.

There is an opportunity in this country to tap the diverse range and reach of its media to speak to the suffering and reflect the aspirations of its impoverished people. We agree with Dan Banik’s view in Starvation and India’s Democracy.  He argued that the merit of Amartya Sen’s belief in democracies which value and promote ‘public action’ is that such societies can legitimately convert discourse on how to reach out to the most vulnerable people into public policies and legal rights for the purpose of bringing the practice of democracy in closer approximation to a government’s stated intentions.  This is certainly a challenge that the Indian media faces today, as members of parliament debate amendments in a few days for the passage of the National Food Security Bill.

(The authors are research scholars at the Centre for Equity Studies, a New Delhi based policy think-tank)