Food Crisis

[Guest]

[url="http://www.hindustantimes.com/Not-enough-food-so-children-learn-to-eat-mud/H1-Article3-527187.aspx"]Not enough food, so children learn to eat mud[/url]

As top officials from multiple ministries worked over the weekend re-crafting a draft legislation deemed inadequate to deliver food to the poorest, a grim reminder of the depth of deprivation in India emerged from its most populous state.



It is people like these that Congress President and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi wants covered by a national Food Security Bill. That is why she pushed the UPA’s top ministers back to the drawing board after rejecting last week a draft about to be presented to the Cabinet.Frail, malnourished children eating moist lumps of mud laced with silica — a raw material for glass sheets and soap — because they are not officially classified as poor and so ineligible for official help: This is what an HT reporter saw in a village of eastern Uttar Pradesh.



Under an unusually hot April sun, skinny, hungry children silently poked around on the dusty edges of a stone quarry in Ganne village, 45 km east of Allahabad and a 12-km walk from the nearest road.



“It tastes like powdered gram, so we eat it,” said Soni (5), a listless girl with a protruding belly. With most families reduced to one or two daily meals of boiled rice and salt — with a watery vegetable on a lucky day — the mud is a free but deadly option at the 20 stone quarries sustaining the poorest villagers.

These families are not eligible for subsidised food and other state programmes, though each of a family of five earns about Rs 400 a month.

Looks like a plant story.