When The Media
Abdicates, The Government Abdicates
By Sevanti Ninan
One arm of the government shuts down
relief works in areas where famine conditions prevail pleading lack of
financial resources. Another arm decides surplus foodstock will be given to
people above the poverty line at subsidised rates to enable speedy offtake of
grain mountains before more procurement leads to new mountains building up.
Would these ironies exist if the media was doing its job?
When a subject captures the media¿s imagination it
does not stop covering it, whether it is President Musharraf coming to talk or
Ritu Beri going to the Buddha Bar in Paris. The tragedy is that the people for
whom media coverage could make the difference between starvation and getting
enough to eat, seldom capture its imagination for long.
Surplus food stocks have been mocking the poor in
India for at least a year. The media highlights this paradox only
intermittently and certainly half-heartedly. The result is that government
policy can reflect media abdication just as surely as it can be shaped by the
media.
A few days ago the central government finally
moved---after many months----to do something about the food mountains in the
Food Corporation of India¿s godowns which have been estimated at 60 million
tonnes. Why did it stir itself into action? Because it is about to acquire more
mountains of food which it will not have the storage capacity for. What did it
do? It announced that foodgrains would be sold at a subsidized price to those
who are not below the poverty line, in order to enable off-take of the grains
before the next harvest comes in. This announcement came just a couple of weeks
after the Government of Rajasthan whose districts are worst affected had
declared that is was shutting down drought relief works for lack of resources.
The poor need food, and the country has plenty of food reserves. But they don¿t
have the purchasing power to buy it because in areas where there is drought
there is also a slump in the labour market. If food reserves are so plentiful
as to be creating a storage problem yet hunger is very much in evidence in some
parts of the country, it stands to reason that your policies must address this
paradox. But part of the reason why the food will now go at subsidised rates to
those who are neither poor nor hungry instead of having been given a few months
ago to those who are both is because there is virtually no sustained discussion
in our newspapers on agriculture and food policy. Or for that matter on famine
conditions which set in in February in some parts of the country and continue
to prevail today.
Three years out of ten there has been a drought, but
the Centre has no drought policy. How frequently does the media highlight this?
Jean Dreze has been writing since February about the drought, the food stocks,
and the poverty of policy which fails to use the grain to allay the hunger
caused by crop failures and livestock losses. In March P Sainath in a cover
story in the Hindu Sunday magazine described in vivid detail the circumstances
of hunger-related deaths in districts of Southern Rajasthan. One family of six
whose breadwinner eventually died, described how they rotated their hunger.
They ate one meal on alternate days. For two months the family had almost no
work.
The rest of the press was not cued in. Four national dailies and two business dailies surveyed by this website two weeks before and two weeks after the Union Budget had extremely meagre coverage of the drought, agriculture and food as issues. Barely 5 to 8 stories per paper in the entire month on all these subjects taken together. And this was the month in which the economy was in focus.