Bloomberg€¦ · October 23, 2012 – It was 1958, my father was still a child, and India was running out of food. That year’s wheat crop had slumped by 15 percent,

October 23, 2012 – It was 1958, my father was still achild, and India was running out of food.

That year’s wheat crop had slumped by 15 percent,the rice harvest by 12 percent, and prices in themarkets were soaring. Far from his village in easternIndia, ships laden with wheat were steaming towardthe country, part of U.S. President DwightEisenhower’s plan to sell surplus grains, tobacco anddairy products to friendly countries. All India Radiogave daily updates on the convoys, and the armybarricaded ports in Mumbai and Kolkata against thehungry crowds.

“It was this very coarse, red wheat,” said NarsinghDeo Mishra, a childhood friend of my father’s andnow a local politician in their home village. “We weretold it was meant for American pigs,” said Mishra,who, like my father, grew up listening to stories aboutthe food shipments. “Back then, we weren’t any betterthan American pigs. So we ate it. We ate it all and webegged for more.”

That year, and the hungry ones that followed, tooktheir toll. At 18, my father, Dinesh, weighed about 40kilograms – just under 90 pounds – and in aphotograph taken at the time, his cheeks are sunken,his Adam’s apple prominent and his eyes bulge froma gaunt skull.

India is now a generation removed from those“ship-to- mouth” days, even though those wordstoday still bring back memories of nationalhumiliation. Less than 2 percent of Indians now gowithout two square meals a day, and far fewer still dieof starvation.

Nutritional Purgatory

And yet, in places like my father’s home village ofAuar, an insidious malnourishment has taken theplace of empty stomachs. The vast majority ofIndians, especially villagers, are suspended in anutritional purgatory – they eat enough to fill their

stomachs; not enough to stay healthy. More than five decades after those U.S. deliveries,

I returned to the dusty, hot village of my father’schildhood, hoping to understand why.

In the arc of modern India’s elemental struggle tofeed its teeming people, my father’s childhood yearswere among the toughest. After squandering an earlyopportunity offered by record-low grain prices tobuild up stockpiles, by the time my father was a child,the country was again falling prey to the vicissitudesof drought and flood that had foreshadowed faminesfor centuries. India was poor, foreign currency scarceand the fields had yet to be sowed with hybrid seedsand enriched with chemical fertilizers.

Green Revolution

As my father grew into his teens and earlyadulthood, India began to gain the upper hand in thatstruggle – a Green Revolution had taken hold inagriculture, enabling the country first to feed itselfand, later, to sell its grain on global markets. Maskedby those victories, something was going horriblywrong. In the early 1970s, the number of calories theaverage Indian ate began rolling backward.

1Hunger Stalks Copyright (c) 2012, Bloomberg, L.P.

BloombergNEWS

Hunger Stalks My Father’s India Long After Starvation Banished

By Mehul Srivastava • Bloomberg News

A villager sweeps the streets in Auar Village. Photographer: Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

In 1973, villagers ate just under 2,300 calories aday, according to the National Sample Survey Office,a branch of the ministry of statistics. By 2010, thatnumber had dropped to about 2,020, compared withthe government floor of 2,400 a day to qualify for foodaid. The mismatch manifests itself in some of theworld’s worst scorecards for health: half of all childrenunder three weigh too little for their age; eight in 10are anemic.

Corruption, Theft

Some of the causes are clear: corruption,incompetence and official indifference mean adecade-long economic boom and bumper harvestshave failed to nourish millions of children doomed tostunted, shortened lives; record stockpiles of grain rotin warehouses; supplies meant for the poor are stolen,sold in local markets, even overseas. As much as $14.5billion in food was looted by corrupt politicians frommy father’s state of Uttar Pradesh alone, according tocourt documents, interviews with rights workers,government anti-graft investigators and localofficials, and testimony from a whistleblower whosaid he was involved in the scam.

Some causes are more subtle: bureaucraticbarriers that stop families getting the free rations theyare entitled to; shrinking access to land and forests togrow or gather food; the rising unpredictability ofagricultural work.

During months of reporting on India’smalnutrition scourge, I spoke almost daily to myfather, who had long since escaped the village andnow runs a national scientific research center inKolkata. His childhood held lessons for me, Isuspected, on the habits and mindsets of the ruralpoor, and the reasons why the bountiful harvests ofIndian fields are denied to the very farmers whoproduce them.

Going Home

So, this June, I drove about 800 kilometers (500miles) southeast from New Delhi to Auar, deep in theheart of Uttar Pradesh state. The local district ofPratapgarh is among the poorest 200 of 640 in thecountry, according to the government.

I’d been to the village before – first as a child, andagain in 2000, when I was getting ready to leave forcollege in Virginia. My father, who wanted me toremember my family’s origins, stood out from cousinsand old friends in his starched white shirt and tailoredtrousers, no longer comfortable sitting cross-legged inthe dust.

He pointed out the few reminders from hischildhood – the elementary school built, according tofamily legend, with the proceeds from a single goldcoin saved by a great-granduncle during years of toilin Burma in the 1920s; the brick additions made tothe mud house that belonged to my grandfather. Bythen, the house was falling apart, emptied of familynow living in cities and scattered across India.

This time, I set up camp outside, sleeping on aborrowed cot under the mango trees my fatherclimbed as a child. For the next two weeks, I walkedthe dry, barren fields of the village, parched andexpectant for the rains that this year, at least, neverfully came.

And for those two weeks I ate what the averagepoor and landless Indian villager could afford.

Phones, Bikes

In some ways, Auar has kept pace with modernIndia.

About 400 of the village’s 2,000-or-so residents


Ghanshyam waits while his wife, Urmila Devi, cooks in herkitchen. Photographer: Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

carry mobile phones, according to the local merchantwho offered a recharging service for the equivalent ofabout 20 cents, using car batteries he carried on theback of his bicycle. Some 60 motorbikes could be seenparked outside houses.

Auar is also connected to the power grid, and everyother day the electricity poles would hum and sparkfor a couple of hours, bringing life to the television inthe small village store and to a handful of tube-wellsthat irrigate the fields of wealthier farmers. It was aluxury, nonetheless, since about 400 million Indianshave no access to electricity at all.

Pigs, Feces

In other ways, Auar is unchanged from my father’stime. It took dozens of agonizing cranks on a handpump to fill each bucket of water; every act of naturerequired a 15-minute walk to a field where pigs rootedaround weeks-old feces.

In 38 of the 40 households I visited, I could countthe ribs of the teenagers and note the distendedbellies and loose, stretchy skin on the toddlers, thefirst and most obvious symptoms of a diet sufficient incalories but lacking in protein. Doctors called thisform of malnourishment kwashiorkor when it wasfirst reported in 1935 from Ghana, taking the localword for the illness a child gets when it is weaned tooearly because of the arrival of a new baby.

In Auar, the villagers had no name for it. Ninety-two percent of Indian mothers hadn’t

heard or didn’t understand the Hindi or local-language terms for malnourishment, a 2011 survey of100 districts with the worst child developmentindicators found. If every child in a village ismalnourished, the survey concluded, then everymother assumes her own child is normal.

I tracked down Ghanshyam, the son of a laborerwho had worked about 2 acres (0.8 hectare) of landmy grandfather owned. My father remembers thatthe laborer’s wife would pick up the rare scraps offood left behind from our family’s dinner, and takethem home for her sons.

‘Never Left Enough’

“She would whisper to me to take larger servingsand leave something for her children,” said my fatherrecently, when I was prodding him for buriedmemories. “Even now, I feel guilty – I never leftenough.”

Rakesh, my oldest uncle, would leave as much ashe could, my father told me. “But I was young, I didn’treally think.”

When I first met Ghanshyam, he took me to hisone-roomed mud and straw hut in the center of thevillage. Dressed in a torn shirt and lungi – a clothwrapped around his waist – and barefoot, it wasunclear whether he was from the same brood ofchildren who grew up with my father. He couldn’t tellme his age – too young to recall, as my father did, theschool holiday to commemorate a visit by ChinesePremier Zhou Enlai in 1956; not too young toremember the short-lived friendship of India andChina turning into a border dispute six years later.

Tuberculosis

Ghanshyam, to me, embodied India’s poor andmalnourished – he owned no land, except for the ploton which his hut stood. His body racked with thetuberculosis that infects 2 million Indians every year,he scrabbled for work on the fields of those who didown their land, making between $2.50 and $3.50 aday.

When strong enough, he told me, he would hitch a


Ghanshyam shops for food in Auar Village. Photographer: SanjitDas/Bloomberg 1076325 Vendors sell produce at a local veg-etable market in Auar Village. Photographer: Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

ride from a passing truck and head for Pratapgarh cityin search of construction work paying as much as$3.75 a day. On other days, Ghanshyam would waitfor villagers to come find him for odd- jobs. Oneafternoon, a neighbor paid him $1.50 to build a smallroof. Once, he spent four or five hours helping to cleara field of weeds and stones. He made 80 cents thatday.

In recent weeks, Ghanshyam had found only a fewdays’ work in total: the monsoon was late, so therewas little to be done in the fields; construction hadslowed in anticipation of those same rains that are thelife-force of rural India.

Left for City

With that meager income, Ghanshyam supportedhis wife, Urmila, two teenaged sons and the wife of anolder son who I never saw. When I asked whathappened to his eldest, Ghanshyam looked away.Urmila, a quiet woman who rarely spoke to me unlessher husband was nearby, later told me the son hadgone to a city to look for work and never returned. Heleft behind two infant boys – more mouths to feed onthe days they didn’t spend at their maternalgrandparents.

Every evening, I would give Ghanshyam about 50cents –last year the government set that amount asthe daily poverty line above which Indians no longer

qualify for food aid. In exchange, his wife included mein their meals the next day.

In the mornings, we drank small cups of watery teawith milk, sweetened with a nugget of jaggery – madefrom unrefined cane sugar. In the afternoons, we eachate three rotis, a heavy, unleavened bread, dippingthem into a thin gruel of lentils and spice called dal. Atnight, before walking over to their home, I used a stickto shake a few sour mangoes from the trees. Urmilaboiled them in the dal to add flavor, pouring themixture over some boiled rice.

Meat, Fish, Eggs

It had been a year, at least, since Ghanshyam lastate meat, eight months since he was able to catch fishin the village river, and six since he had had an egg, hetold me.

Later, when I showed photographs of the meals toRachita Singh, a nutritionist at the Saket MaxHospital in New Delhi, she estimated they wouldprovide about 1,700 to 1,800 calories a day.

This diet, heavy in cereals and other carbohydrate-based calories, is what most rural Indians eat. In2010, 64 percent of the calories consumed by villagerscame from cereals, about 9 percent from oils and fats,less than 5 percent each from sugar and pulses likethe lentils we ate. Fruit and vegetables, meat, eggs andfish together made up about 2.5 percent, according tostudies of meals across rural India by the statisticsministry.

So far, experts have mostly argued over possiblereasons for India’s worsening diet, without reaching aconclusion; Abhijit Banerjee, an economist atMassachusetts Institute of Technology’s PovertyAction Lab once described it to me as the “million-dollar question.”

‘Slice of Mango’

Life in an Indian village has always been hard, eventhough my father remains nostalgic for childhoodthere. Over the past decade he wrote and publishedshort stories about his childhood, mostly in theliterary section of Kolkata’s English-languagenewspaper, The Statesman. He scoured his memory– and his fantasies – for details and, in a story


hyam gets ready to go shopping in Auar Village. Photographer: Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

dedicated to the family mango trees I now foundmyself sleeping under, described his dinners:

“The stories would continue till mother was readywith thick chapatis of bajra (millet) and a curry of newpotatoes and urad dal (dark lentils) with a lot of ghee(clarified butter) and saag of either mustard or bathua(a leafy vegetable), and of course two or three types ofmango pickles,” he wrote in a “A Slice of Mango.”

That description of a rich and varied diet alwaysfelt at odds to me with the reality of what Indians inhis era ate. When I finally asked if that was really atrue picture, his answer was the saddest thing he evertold me.

“That is how it ought to have been.”

Riverside Life

Auar, like most Indian villages I have visited, isactually a collection of hamlets scattered around acentral body of water, usually a deep well or two. InAuar, life centered on what the villagers generouslycalled the river. More of a rivulet, it was too small toshow up on my maps.

Sluggish and dirty when I visited at the end of thedry season, it served a multitude of purposes alongthe narrow stretch that ran past the village. Upriver,where the water was thought to be cleaner, childrenwould do back flips and women brought theirlaundry, the gentle slapping of wet cloth on stones

filling the air. Early in the mornings, the fewhouseholds that owned a buffalo or cow would bringthem for a bath. Downriver from the village, past aquick bend, the bank was a squelching, stinking opentoilet.

Caste Divisions

The hamlets, called bastis, were segregated mostlyby caste or religion. Others were settlements of five orsix huts belonging to members of the same family.Sixty-two years after India’s first constitutiondeclared caste discrimination illegal, the system stilldictates the daily lives and constrains opportunitiesfor hundreds of millions of people.

My first day in the village, I was taken to the upper-caste basti to meet the village headman, a tall, broad-chested Brahmin named Vinod Upadhyay. I wantedhim to know I would be living in the village, andasking questions. He offered me a plastic chairoutside his two-story brick house, where a shinymotorcycle stood next to an electric water pump. Aservant brought out tea and biscuits.

After my first sip, I asked Upadhyay why he wasn’tjoining me.

“When I eat with lower castes, it disagrees with mystomach,” he answered nonchalantly in Hindi.

Middle Ground

My father’s family, of a middling caste called theKayastha, was perched somewhere in the center – wehad neither the land nor privileges of the Brahmins,but were spared the humiliating poverty of the lowestcastes. Our hamlet reflected that; in old photographsmy father took during trips back to his village, themud hut has started to take the shape of a house – asmall brick addition in the early 1970s, anotherexpansion in the early 1980s. Our neighbor was adistant cousin, his neighbor another cousin, and ourhamlet about a 10-minute walk from Ghanshyam’s,where the huts were smaller, packed closer together,sharing a single hand-pumped well.

At the bottom of the pile was the basti for thelowest caste Hindus and Muslim washermen. Thehouses were sometimes no more than straw andwood held together by rope; a thick, sludgy open


Ghanshyam and Mehul Srivastava, a Bloomberg journalist, sharea meal together in Auar Village.

Photographer: Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

sewer – more a rut in the land, filled with dirty waterand feces – oozed past them.

A paved road, built in the past five years or so, ranalongside the hamlets, connecting them to a smallhighway town called Shankarganj, a blink-and-you-miss-it highway pit stop with a few shops sellingbottled soft drinks and stale biscuits. On Saturdays, avegetable bazaar would set up around 3 p.m. andappeared to be the social highlight of the week.

Cramping Bowels

My life in the village quickly fell into a pattern thatin many ways has remained unchanged for centuries.

Rising with the sun, my stomach already growlingwith hunger, I would seek a secluded spot in which toempty my slowly cramping bowels. With littlerunning water, and almost no indoor toilets, entirefields were open latrines. Women rose earlier still,defecating in the dark in the hopes of some privacy.Open defecation is a national crisis for some 665million Indians, soiling water and food supplies, anda major contributor to the spread of pathogens thatkill about 1,000 children a day from diarrhea,hepatitis and other diseases.

I’d bathe under a tube-well pipe, pumping withone hand while trying to rub myself clean. AtGhanshyam’s home, his wife would already beburning some dry twigs to boil our morning tea.Before the sun rose too high, I would accompanyGhanshyam on his search for work.

City Slacker

One morning, we hitched a ride to Pratapgarh city,joining a group of day laborers waiting at a trafficintersection to be picked for work. Those with obviousskills – the painters with their brushes and cans ofturpentine, the carpenters and their tools – werechosen first. Last were people like Ghanshyam, whohad little to offer but their strength. I followed him towhere about 20 men were working on thefoundations for a family home. My offer to labor wasrefused – my city clothes, tinted glasses and well-fedframe betrayed me as an outsider.

I watched Ghanshyam carry bricks for an hour, hispace slacking as the sun climbed. By 10 a.m., the

temperature was 102 degrees Fahrenheit (38.9degrees Celsius). When the foreman yelled atGhanshyam for being too slow, I took his place. Wedug ditches and broke bricks to mix in the mortar. Ithad been a week since I had migrated to the villagediet, and by noon, I was exhausted. The men aroundme had withered too, their movements slower, theirribs glistening in the sun.

Ghanshyam opened a lunch box, and we ateonions and rotis. We had drunk the dal while waitingto be picked for work.

Small Return

The temperature had climbed to 118, and theworkers talked the foreman – cursing andcomplaining – into letting them rest in the shade ahalf-hour longer. For two more hours, Ghanshyamand I took turns laboring. Finally, at 4 p.m., theforeman handed out the wages: Ghanshyam pocketed$1.75 for both of us; the other men earned $2.20.Ghanshyam’s tuberculosis had slowed him down toomuch; I had done little to help.

Working with Ghanshyam reminded me of ahome-building project I’d volunteered for a fewmonths ago in Delhi organized by non-profit Habitatfor Humanity. I’d started off my day enthusiasticallypassing bricks in a human chain to colleagues. Withinhours, back aching and tired, I abandoned the effort,


Urmila Devi serves roti, rice and lentils with unripe mango on aplate. Photographer: Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

soaking up the New Delhi metro’s air conditioning onthe ride back home.

My diet in India’s capital and the sedentarylifestyle of a financial journalist hadn’t prepared mefor building houses – not for Habitat for Humanityand not to help Ghanshyam. As a member of thesmall, urban middle class, I ate close to what theaverage American does – more than 2,500 calories onmost days, close to 3,000 when I ordered in pizza,washed down with Coca- Cola.

Pizza Fantasy

In the village, the cereal-laden meals sat heavy inmy stomach, and I felt less hungry than I hadimagined I would. The most obvious impact was aconstant sense of lethargy – I moved more slowly andtook longer to recover from short bursts of labor, likeat the construction site. My weight dropped by about5 pounds in the two weeks I lived there.

In the evenings, my phone would light up around7 with a text message from Papa John’s, the U.S. pizzachain that had recently opened a branch in Delhi. For$11 – or 22 times the government’s poverty line – Icould order the medium pepperoni and cheese pizzaI’d been dreaming about, except Papa John’s woulddeliver it to my air-conditioned apartment in a poshDelhi suburb, not to this sweaty, hungry corner ofIndia.

Calorie Puzzle

In 2009, economists Angus Deaton and JeanDreze wrote a paper arguing that the reasonIndians were consuming fewer calories today thanin the 1980s was that they needed fewer calories.Poor Indians now had bicycles and fell sick lessoften, they said, and that might solve the puzzlethat has confounded economists studying Indiannutrition – falling calorie counts at a time of risingreal incomes.

Economists have seen this trend twice before,according to Deaton and Dreze – in post-MaoChina in the 1980s and 1990s, and in IndustrialRevolution Britain, from 1775 to 1850.

Before I left for the village, I called Deaton, whoteaches at Princeton University. He was irritatedthat my questions focused only on calories – theenvironment in which those calories wereconsumed and burned, and the manual labor theperson had to endure were equally important, if notmore so.

“I am not saying, for instance, that Indians arewell- nourished,” he said. “What I am saying is thatthe fact that they are eating fewer calories doesn’tmean anything unless you know more about therest of their lives.”

Budget Squeeze

Following Ghanshyam around, I was lessconvinced that Deaton’s explanation was the rightone. Neither are Deepankar Basu and Amit Basole,two University of Massachusetts economists. In adraft paper last month they found that while Indianincomes have gone up, a rise in spending on otheressential items – such as healthcare andtransportation –meant the amount of money left overfor food has remained stagnant at a time of highinflation.

There is little data to show that Indians havemoved into less physically strenuous jobs – India hasyet to experience the kind of industrial revolutionseen in large parts of China that has freed an entiregeneration from the fields. Sixty-nine percent of thenation’s 1.2 billion people still live in the countryside,against 49 percent of China’s 1.3 billion.


Urmila Devi holds unripe mangoes. Photographer: Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

‘Poor, Slowly Worsening’

The lives of Ghanshyam and other villagers inAuar seemed beyond what 1,700 calories or eventhe government recommended minimum intake of2,400 calories could sustain. India’s state medicalresearch council says workers doing moderate orheavy labor need 2,730 to 3,490 calories.

I had picked Auar because it allowed me aglimpse into how little had changed in rural Indiasince my father was young, in spite of a five-decadegap during which India became a food- surplusnation. By almost every measure, Auar fits thenational averages for nutrition – poor, and slowlyworsening.

After some advances in the lead-up to the early1990s, malnourishment rates in India appear to bestuck. Forty-six percent of children under threewere malnourished in 2005, the last time anationwide survey was carried out, compared with47 percent the decade before. Twenty-one percentof Indian adults are malnourished, against 17percent 10 years earlier. If lives had gotten lessstrenuous, and living environments healthier, thenshouldn’t those rates have dropped? Deaton agreedthat the latest data were puzzling.

To be fair, while India has struggled to improvenutrition for the entire country, it has largelymanaged to eradicate starvation deaths. Also, asIndia hasn’t counted its malnourished in sevenyears, Ghanshyam and the rest of Auar may beoutliers in a sea of improvement.

Stoned in Heat

Most days, Ghanshyam never found work. Wewould lie in the shade, stoned in the heat. Wemoved as little as we could, stirring only to swataway flies and move our cots with the shadows.Soon after sundown, the darkness was complete,and almost everybody would head to sleep.

I’d walk back to the ruins of my father’s oldhouse, and imagine his childhood.

In the stories he published, my father recreates abucolic life interrupted by misfortune – disease, thecurses of slighted gypsy women, ghosts andpoachers. The stories echo his own childhood. He

survived smallpox, his body still scarred from thenear-death experience. A sister, born underweightand listless, died of malnourishment at six monthsold. She had been named Munni; Hindi for “ourlittle girl.”

Railway Children

In 1964, my grandfather landed a job as aconductor for state-owned Indian Railways,moving the entire family – my grandmother, threesons (two more came later) and three daughters –to the city of Allahabad in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Insocialist India, a government job was perhaps theonly way out of poverty. My grandfather leveragedhis accomplishment with a relentless focus oneducating his sons.

That urge was a relic of our caste beginnings.Without large tracts of land to cultivate, Kayasthasin Uttar Pradesh and the neighboring state ofBengal became a caste of peons – clerks,bookkeepers, minor functionaries for the localmaharajahs. That emphasis on being able to readand write has left an imprint throughout myfamily’s known history – the great grand-uncle whospent his life’s savings to build the primary schoolmy father studied in, and which still educates thevillage’s children.


Urmila Devi carries water drawn from a local hand-pump in AuarVillage, India. Photographer: Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

Hardship Endures

Hardship hadn’t ended with the move to cityliving, nor with the ballooning shipments of Americangrain. Even as U.S. exports of wheat surged fromnothing in 1954 to 4 million tons by 1960,intermittent floods and drought meant hungerremained a menacing presence. Money the U.S.loaned or granted back to the Indian governmentfrom the wheat sales failed to find its way into betterirrigation, storage or roads.

In the markets, food remained unreliable.Droughts in the mid-1960s pushed prices far beyondmy grandfather’s income. New to the city, my fatherand his brothers stood in lines outside ration shops toget rice and wheat. Often, he remembers, the shopswould run out of supplies before their turn.

At 14, my father had won a National MeritScholarship, an Indian government programdesigned to help poor, talented students in villagespay for their high school and early college educations.The promised monthly stipend did not come till fouryears later, by then my father was a student atAllahabad University.

By the time my father was 16, escape was near.Higher- yielding hybrid seeds, modern fertilizers andimproved irrigation meant famines were becoming arelic of India’s past.

End of the Beginning

At 19, he read an advertisement in a newspaper fora job in Mumbai with the government’s science andresearch programs. He clipped out the ad and stowedaway on a train, in much the same way as millions ofmigrants still seek out a better life in Mumbai, Delhiand Bangalore today. The interview went well, and helanded a job that allowed him to earn a PhD innuclear physics at the same time.

For my father, the years of lining up for foodrations were over. His older brother, who studiedengineering, had gotten a job with the government ofUttar Pradesh, and their combined incomes paid forthe education of their younger brothers and theweddings of their sisters. Looking through mygrandmother’s old trunks this summer, I found stacksof receipts from the postal service checks that my

father sent home – the first was in 1971 – each with ashort faded note to his family, including my favorite,an admonishment to stop pressuring him to getmarried.

Best Forgotten

That final leap, from poverty to lower-middle class,was repeated by each of my uncles – the threeremaining brothers also became engineers. Mycousins and I were born into families that could easilyafford food, and the deprivation of Auar became amemory, best forgotten and rarely discussed.

And yet, at family reunions, it is clear thatchildhood hunger stalked them into adulthood.

My cousins and I tower over our uncles – I am fourinches (10 centimeters) taller than my father, sixinches taller than my mother. One cousin was anamateur boxer in the Indian Navy, another passed therigorous physical training required to join the Indianintelligence service and is posted in the Himalayas. Asingle generation of good nutrition catapulted us intothe top 10 percent of Indians for height and health.

Deaton, the Princeton economist, pointed out thatin healthy countries, the average adult heightincreases by about a centimeter every 10 years –Scandinavians have grown by just that rate since1950.

Indians have managed to grow at half that pace –


Ghanshyam lies in a cot while his wife Urmila Devi sits in theirhut in Auar Village in Pratapgarh district of Uttar Pradesh, India.


it would take us more than 200 years to reach thefive-foot, 8-inch average height of an Americanmale in 2006.

Dangling Feet

While the single generation of good nutrition thatmy cousins and I lived through separates us from ourparents, it also separates us from the nationalaverages. In Auar, I felt like a giant, stooping throughdoorways, my feet dangling over the edge of myborrowed cot.

At dusk, I would walk with Ghanshyam along theborders of the village.

Ghanshyam, with me at least, is a quiet man,miserly with his words. He had resisted my attemptsto get him to share more than his most basic thoughts.One night, when I asked him about his favorite meal,he suddenly opened up. He told me he had beenhappiest when planning his eldest son’s wedding. As

the groom’s father, he was the most important guest,and he described at length the dinner thrown by thegirl’s family.

“Mutton korma, chicken curry, fish curry, naan,saag paneer (spinach cooked in cottage cheese),pulao,” he listed, along with the desserts – asweetened rice pudding called kheer; jalebis, whichare sweet, fried dough; and ice-cream.

On my last day in the village, I drove to Pratapgarhand had a restaurant pack up that exact meal. Thatnight, under the mango trees, I threw a small banquetfor Ghanshyam’s family and that of his neighbors.

Bone Banquet

Thirteen of us sat under the biggest tree, and in thelight from my car’s headlights, Ghanshyam and Ishared a small bottle of local liquor made from aflower called mahua he had brought for the occasion.He laughed when I spat out my first sip, and I noticedfor the first time that he had no teeth except for thefront row.

About an hour after dinner, as I packed my gear forthe trip back to Delhi, I heard a rustling behind me. Ithought it was a stray dog going through the emptyplates and Styrofoam boxes, and I turned on myflashlight to scare it away.

Instead, the beam lit up Ghanshyam’s wife. She’dcome back, she said, for the chicken bones I’d thrownaway. For a family too poor to buy meat, even boiled-up bones make a valuable addition to the diet.

“With some spices, it will taste just like chickencurry,” she said.

–Editors: Ben Richardson, Suresh Seshadri, BretOkeson


Ghanshyam walks to his hut in Auar Village in Pratapgarh districtof Uttar Pradesh, India. Photographer: Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

August 29, 2012 – Ram Kishen, 52, half-blind andhalf- starved, holds in his gnarled hands thereason for his hunger: a tattered card entitlinghim to subsidized rations that now serves as asymbol of India’s biggest food heist.

Kishen has had nothing from the village shopfor 15 months. Yet 20 minutes’ drive fromSatnapur, past bone-dry fields and tiny hamletswhere children with distended bellies play, agovernment storage facility five football fieldslong bulges with wheat and rice. By law, those57,000 tons of food are meant for Kishen and the105 other households in Satnapur with rationbooks. They’re meant for some of the 350 millionfamilies living below India’s poverty line of 50cents a day.

Instead, as much as $14.5 billion in food waslooted by corrupt politicians and their criminalsyndicates over the past decade in Kishen’s homestate of Uttar Pradesh alone, according to datacompiled by Bloomberg. The theft blunted thecountry’s only weapon against widespreadstarvation– a five-decade-old public distributionsystem that has failed to deliver record harvests tothe plates of India’s hungriest.

“This is the most mean-spirited, ruthlesslyexecuted corruption because it hits the poorestand most vulnerable in society,” said NareshSaxena, who, as a commissioner to the nation’sSupreme Court, monitors hunger-basedprograms across the country. “What I find evenmore shocking is the lack of willingness intrying to stop it.”

Unpunished

This scam, like many others involvingpoliticians in India, remains unpunished. A statepolice force beholden to corrupt lawmakers, anunderfunded federal anti-graft agency and a

sluggish court system have resulted in fiveoverlapping investigations over seven years– andzero convictions.

India has run the world’s largest public fooddistribution system for the poor since the failureof two successive monsoons led to the creation ofthe Food Corporation of India in 1965. Thegovernment last year spent a record $13 billionbuying and storing commodities such as wheatand rice, and expects that figure to grow this year.

Yet 21 percent of all adults and almost half ofIndia’s children under 5 years old are stillmalnourished. About 900 million Indians alreadyeat less than government-recommendedminimums. As local food prices climbed morethan 70 percent over the past five years,dependence on subsidies has grown.

From the government warehouses, millions oftons are dispatched monthly to states includingUttar Pradesh, which are supposed to distributethem at subsidized prices to the poor. About 10percent of India’s food rots or is lost before it can

1Poor in India Starve Copyright (c) 2012, Bloomberg, L.P.

BloombergNEWS

Poor in India Starve as Politicians Steal $14.5 Billion of Food

By Mehul Srivastava and Andrew MacAskill • Bloomberg News

Sangathin activist Surgaia Vaish in Satnapur Village, UttarPradesh, India. Photographer: Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

be distributed, while some 3 million tons of wheatin buffer stocks is more than two years old,according to the government.

Food Gap

Even after accounting for the wastage, only 41percent of the food set aside for feeding the poorreached households nationwide in 2005,according to a World Bank study commissionedby the government and released last year.

In Uttar Pradesh, where the minister of foodstands charged with attempted murder,kidnapping, armed robbery and electoral fraud,the diversion was more than 80 percent in 2005,the World Bank report said.

Fully 100 percent of the food meant for thepoor in Kishen’s home district was stolen during athree-year period, according to India’s CentralBureau of Investigation, the country’s leadinganti-corruption agency.

Hunger is worse in villages than in cities. Indiansliving in rural areas on average eat 2,020 calories aday, against a global average of 2,800 and 11 percentless than they did in 1973, according to governmentand United Nations’ data.

‘Buzz Off’

When Kishen and other residents of Satnapursought their monthly quotas at the village’s FairPrice Shop, as the ration stores are called, they’deither find a locked door or be told to return thefollowing month, said Javeed Ahmad, the CBIofficer leading the agency’s investigation of thescam for more than three years.

“Who is a person who holds a below povertyline ration card? A person of no influence,” hesaid. “If he shows up at the Fair Price Shop andthere is no below poverty line wheat, you can justtell him to buzz off.”

The scam itself was simple. So much so, that by2007 corrupt politicians and officials in at least 30of Uttar Pradesh’s 71 districts had learned to copyit, according to an affidavit filed as part of a probeordered by the high court in Allahabad, one of thebiggest cities in India’s most-populous state. Allthey had to do was pay the government thesubsidized rates for the food. Then instead ofselling it on to villagers at the lower prices, theysold to traders at market rates.

Big Daddy

The first person to figure out how to run thetheft on a mass scale was a man named OmPrakash Gupta, the CBI’s Ahmad said.

“Gupta was definitely the big daddy of thescam,” said Ahmad. “Over time, every districtcame up with more efficient executions of thissystem.”

Gupta was a six-time member of the UttarPradesh legislative assembly and the owner of afamily run grain-trading firm. By the time he ranfor national parliament in 2009, he had beencharged with 69 criminal offenses, including fivemurders, two armed robberies and gangsterism,according to a declaration he filed with theElection Commission of India.

In June 2011 the CBI also charged him withforging documents and other offenses inconnection with food theft from the rationprogram. Gupta, who lost the parliamentary race,died of a heart attack in April at the age of 69

2JPMorgan Trader’s Positions Copyright (c) 2012, Bloomberg, L.P.

52-year-old Ram Kishen poses for a photo with his governmentprovided ration card in Satnapur Village in Sitapur district of UttarPradesh, India. Photographer: Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

before a trial could begin on the food case. Hewasn’t convicted of any other crime.

Only Warrant

So far, he is the only senior political figure tohave been arrested by the CBI over the food scam:Ahmad got a warrant after Gupta manhandledone of his investigators.

The CBI’s indictment of Gupta provides aglimpse of how the operation was run. Foodpurchased by the central government is trucked todistricts like Sitapur, where Kishen’s home ofSatnapur is located, and stored until marketingmanagers in the food distribution system sign offon its dispatch to the Fair Price Shops.

The owners of those shops, called kothedars inHindi, bring cashier’s checks for the subsidizedprice of the supplies. A kilogram of rice, forinstance, costs as little as 2 rupees, or about 3.6cents, in most states. The market price for similarquality rice is about 10 times higher.

The shop owners are supposed to sell the foodto villagers without making a profit.

Gupta got around the system in Sitapur byusing a dummy firm called Naimish Oil IndustriesLtd., according to the CBI’s indictment. It paid for

subsidized rice, wheat and sugar from thewarehouses, picking them up in Gupta-ownedtrucks, scooters and motorized rickshaws, thensold the food to private companies, according tothe CBI.

Money Transfers

Gupta and his family pocketed the differenceby transferring the money from Naimish Oil’saccounts to their own, according to theindictment.

“While the government is getting real money,the foodgrains don’t actually go to the Fair PriceShops,” said Ahmad.

In one transaction investigated by the CBI,Gupta sold 17.7 million kilograms of wheat to fourdifferent companies hundreds of kilometers awayin the cities of Kolkata and Raipur. The companiespaid $2.1 million to Naimish Oil.

Over a three-year period, 110.6 millionkilograms of wheat and rice meant for India’spoor was transferred from rail stations in Sitapurdistrict to Bangladesh, according to the CBI’sindictment. In other transactions, the companiesbuying the grain were in Nepal, said Ahmad, theCBI investigator.

“Since they were paying tax, paying freight tothe railways and actually delivering the promisedfoodgrains, nobody asked the question of wherethey procured them originally,” he said.

Groaning Stockpiles

While the food theft by Gupta and his copycatsaround the state may have robbed people likeKishen of their dinner, it hasn’t put a dent inIndia’s stockpiles.

Deadly famines were a recurrent feature of lifein India until the country embarked on the so-called “green revolution” in the 1960s,experimenting with high-yielding strains,irrigation and pesticides. The nation finallyachieved self- sufficiency in food production in thelate 1970s.

At the same time, the government beganbuilding up buffer stocks of food. While the Food


Day laborers move sacks of rice at the Uttar Pradesh state ware-house in Mishrikh in Uttar Pradesh, India.


Corporation of India is required to keep about 32million metric tons of rice and wheat, bumperharvests have left the country with a stockpile ofmore than 80 million tons, according to thecorporation. Stacked in 50- kilogram sacks, thefood would reach from Sitapur to the moon, withat least 270,000 bags to spare.

To stop food rotting, the central governmentlifted a four- year ban on exports of wheat lastyear. In June, India donated 250,000 tons ofwheat to Afghanistan.

Starkly Visible

The nation’s food surplus is starkly visible atthe state storage facility about 10 kilometers (6.3miles) from Kishen’s village of Satnapur.

On June 28, 60 trucks loaded with bags ofgrain waited outside the walled-off piece of land,one of four similar stockpiling sites in the district.Inside, 40,000 tons of wheat and 17,000 tons ofrice spilled out from a small warehouse and werestacked in the open in three-story-high piles, theblue tarpaulin covers tied tight with rope.

The trucks will be parked up for weeks beforethere is space inside so they can unload.

In Satnapur itself, the prominent ribs andbloated bellies of children playing in the streetsgive the telltale sign of chronic malnourishment.The village has no electricity, and the local rationshop has been closed for months, residents said.

Of the 106 village households that qualify forsubsidized rice, wheat, sugar and kerosene usedas cooking fuel, only about half are receiving it,said Surbala Vaish, 40, an activist with the localfarmers and workers’ collective, known asSangathin.

Pepsi or Rations?

Urmila, a widow who guessed she was in hersixties and lives in a household of five, shows herration card; it’s been 18 months since she lastreceived her allotment.

A different government card recognizes herstatus as a widow, meaning she qualifies for riceand wheat for close to free. She’s had the card for

six years and has never received her entitlement. “If you can buy a Pepsi in every village in India,

why can’t the government get us our rations?”asked Vaish, who lives in Satnapur. “The reasonwe don’t is because the government doesn’t wantus to– they all get a cut.”

The proprietor of the local ration shop is a frail,old man called Mattre. Like Urmila and manyother Indians, he goes by one name. An illiteratecow-herder, he said he was granted the shopbecause he is blind. Instead of running it himself,he says he receives $3.50 a day from the villagechief, who then takes care of the day-to-dayoperations.

‘Not My Fault’

“It’s in my name, but someone else runs theshop,” said Mattre, standing outside his straw-and-mud hut. “If the headman isn’t giving peopletheir food, it’s his fault, not mine.”

The village head, actually a woman namedKumari Poonam Yadav, couldn’t be reached. Aperson who answered a cell phone number thatvillagers said was hers said he didn’t know anyoneby that name.

In Sitapur town, an hour’s drive from the


A caretaker exits the closed fair price shop of Satnapur Village inSitapur district of Uttar Pradesh, India.


village, Anoop Gupta steps out of a white ToyotaFortuner SUV. He is Om Prakash Gupta’s son, andby the time his father died in April, he had wonOm Prakash’s old seat in the state legislativeassembly.

Toyota SUV

As Gupta, 42, walks away from the SUV, whichretails for $37,500 according to Toyota MotorCorp.’s website, armed police officers push awaythe crowd of people rushing to touch his feet, asign of respect. He walks across a courtyard to asmall office behind a gas station, sits at a baredesk, shoos off his entourage and gives a spirited,one-hour defense of his father.

Gupta himself hasn’t been charged with anywrongdoing, although the CBI lists bank accountsin his name through which his family allegedlyreceived money.

“Let me ask you this: If I had, or my father had,or my family had been stealing food from the poorin Sitapur, would they re-elect me?” he said. “Iswear upon my dead father that this is a vendettathe CBI has against us. If I ever once stole a grainof rice from a poor man, it would be like eating theflesh of a cow.”

Cows are considered holy in Hinduism andeating beef is forbidden. While Gupta declined todiscuss the details of the indictment, he said thathis family might have mistakenly paid lower taxeson the transactions. His father and the family firmwere simply procuring wheat and rice on the openmarket in Sitapur and selling to traders aroundthe country, he said.

Just a Trader

“How am I supposed to tell if the wheat or therice or the sugar in the local market is meant for aration shop?” he asked. “I am a trader. I buy andsell thousands of tons of food a month.”

Over the past seven years, different courtorders and changing state governments haveresulted in at least three agencies being taskedwith probing the theft: the CBI, a SpecialInvestigative Team of the Uttar Pradesh policeand the Economic Offenses Wing of the centralgovernment. In addition to the SpecialInvestigative Team, both the state police’s FoodCell, and its Criminal Investigations Division arecarrying out probes. Some of the investigationsoverlap; others run independently.

The CBI, for instance, is only looking at caseswhere food actually left the state, while the SpecialInvestigative Team is looking at all the cases andthe EOW is focused primarily on the money trail.

Cobbled Together

In the state capital Lucknow, CBI officerAhmad, 52, said the inquiry he heads is the largesthe has undertaken. His group of 22 investigatorsand a few researchers operates out of a run- down,three-story colonial building neighboring ahairdresser and a grocer. Ahmad’s team, cobbledtogether by a 2008 government order thatallowed him to poach 14 officers from around thestate, is only authorized to look at the periodbetween 2004 and 2007 and the investigative areais limited to six districts because of a lack ofmanpower.

Ahmad said he will wrap up his inquiry by theend of the year, and he thought it unlikely he


A day laborer walks past piles of covered grains at an open ware-house of the Uttar Pradesh state warehouse in Mishrikh in UttarPradesh, India. Photographer: Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

would charge any more senior politicians. “As a layman, you would say that there must be

a big man on top, but can I prove it?” he said.“Even if there is a top gun, I won’t get legallytenable evidence.”

Massive Scale

While Ahmad’s investigation is aided by thesimplicity of the food heist, it is impeded by its sheersize. He estimated that in its heyday, the scaminvolved 5,000 daily transactions spread across 500square kilometers, involving thousands of individualsand hundreds of bank accounts.

In December 2007, the then-Home Secretary ofUttar Pradesh, Mahesh Gupta, created the SpecialInvestigative Team. Based in Lucknow, it was given avast mandate: to investigate the “large-scale scams indifferent schemes of the public distribution system indifferent districts.”

The period under investigation, though, waslimited to between March 2004 and October 2005.

The team’s head, Assistant Director General ofthe Criminal Investigation Department Rajeev RaiBhatnagar, spends one day a week at the job. Therest of his time is spent on other assignments,including the CID’s separate investigation.

He said in a June 20 interview in his office, notfar from Ahmad’s, that he interprets his mandateonly to find and arrest people involved in foodtheft during that window of time. The briefdoesn’t extend to shutting down any currentschemes, he said.

‘Not My Concern’

“Is the scam still ongoing? It may be,” saidBhatnagar. “But that is not my concern.” The teamhas about 300 open investigations and noprosecutions, he said.

A. L. Banerjee, an additional director general of thethird investigative body, the Economic OffensesWing, works from a government building in Lucknowwhere vagrants sleep on stairways and piles ofgarbage buzz with flies. He declined to commentwhen visited by a Bloomberg reporter.

In filings made to the High Court of Allahabad in

2010, the EOW said that while it was continuing toinvestigate the scam in seven districts, it didn’t havethe manpower to extend the probe to a statewidelevel. It asked the court to help it source cars,computers, printers, photocopiers, fax machines andaccommodation for its officers.

Tracking all three investigations is VishwanathChaturvedi, 47. A trade union leader with a lawdegree, Chaturvedi has filed public-interest lawsuitsin various courts exhorting the judiciary to prod thethree agencies into working faster and moreefficiently, and to push for prosecutions that wouldput senior politicians in jail.

Lawsuits

Chaturvedi filed the first lawsuit asking thegovernment to investigate the stolen food in Sitapurin late 2005, then followed up by persuading theAllahabad High Court to extend the investigation toneighboring districts and to demand regular statusreports from all three agencies. He later appealed tothe Delhi High Court to monitor the investigationregularly, and has also filed petitions in front of theSupreme Court of India.

Still, he said in an interview that he doesn’t believethese investigations will snag any senior politicians.

“None of these agencies have the manpower, thewillpower, or even the political support needed toinvestigate a theft of this size, this nature and thisbreadth,” he said, sitting in the living room of hishouse in New Delhi. Visitors must pass by a policecheckpoint on the road and an armed officer at thefront door after Chaturvedi received anonymousthreats.

He often gets his tips and information from foodactivists in Uttar Pradesh and his own contacts in thetrade unions. He then enters it into court testimony inthe CBI’s investigation.

Whistleblower

On December 18, 2011, he walked into the officesof the CBI with a man named Rajiv Yadav. Yadav toldinvestigators he could provide the first link betweenthe scam and the man known as Raja Bhaiya– UttarPradesh’s food minister.


Raja Bhaiya, which roughly translates from Hindias “our older brother, the king,” has cases pendingagainst him for attempted murder, kidnapping,armed robbery and electoral fraud under his formalname, Raghuraj Pratap Singh, according to hisdeclaration to the election commission. He hasn’t yetbeen charged with any involvement in the food scamand has denied the other allegations in publicspeeches.

In Pratapgarh, the district Raja Bhaiya represents,signboards line the highway congratulating him forhis latest electoral victory, in March. On thesignboards, he wears his hair short, with tintedeyeglasses and a white, collared shirt. He doesn’tsmile.

Second Stint

This is his second time as food minister. During hisprevious tenure, from 2004 to 2007, the food scamspread from Sitapur district to all around the state,the CBI’s Ahmad said.

Yadav has turned over evidence about Raja Bhaiyato the CBI and given sworn testimony to the DelhiHigh Court, according to court documents.

Yadav said in an interview that he had worked forRaja Bhaiya as a public-relations officer, a fact

confirmed by a state directory of officials from thatperiod, his pay slips and a state identity card seen byBloomberg News. He said he also had informalduties: to collect various sums of money fromgovernment officials involved in the scam, to recordthem in a ledger and to hand them to Raja Bhaiya orhis wife.

All the details also appear in Yadav’s sworntestimony to the court. A copy of the hand-writtenledger is included as part of the affidavit.

Short, Mustachioed

Short and mustachioed, Yadav now lives in hidingin New Delhi. He said he grew up near Raja Bhaiya’shouse in a town named Kunda and was involved inlocal politics with him. In 2004, when Raja Bhaiyawas appointed minister for food, he brought Yadav,40, along.

Yadav said that between 2004 and 2007 it was hisresponsibility to collect about $200,000 a week fromsenior local officials. They were giving Raja Bhaiya hiscut from what Yadav was told was the food scam.

The ledger lists dates, names and amounts. Insome cases, it only lists a person’s official job title. Inone instance, it lists an entire government bureau, theWeights and Measurements Department.

The cash would arrive in suitcases and thickenvelopes. After counting the money, Yadav wouldpass it to Raja Bhaiya’s wife, Bhanvi Kumari, at theirhome on the edge of Lucknow. To protect himselfagainst any accusation of skimming cash, he said hekept a listing in the ledger of how much was collectedand the date, which Kumari would countersign. Shehasn’t been charged with any offense.

Not Available

Raja Bhaiya’s office declined to make him or hiswife available for an interview. Yashvant Singh, amember of the local assembly who helps handle RajaBhaiya’s press relations, asked Bloomberg Newsreporters to come to Lucknow on June 29 for aninterview with the minister. The reporters waited forsix hours in Raja Bhaiya’s office on June 29 and thenwere asked to leave. Attempts to interview theminister on a second visit to Lucknow on Aug. 9 were


Locally elected politician Anoop Gupta in Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh,India. Photographer: Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

unsuccessful. The ledger is being held by the CBI as evidence,

and a copy was given to Bloomberg News. It showsthat Raja Bhaiya’s wife received approximately $20million over a 1 1/2-year period between 2005 and2007, according to Yadav’s notations.

Yadav said he had other diaries and ledgers, whichhe hasn’t shown to the CBI or others. They showadditional sums of money being transferred– asmuch as $18 million over a three- year period, he said.He called the books an insurance policy against beingkilled.

Never Scared

“I never for one moment felt scared that I wouldget caught,” said Yadav, wearing a blue-and-whitepolo shirt during an interview in which he rarelyuncrossed his arms. “If I hadn’t come forward, no onewould ever have known this was happening.”

He earned Raja Bhaiya’s trust by running with thegang in their home district, and being involved in twomurders and three attempted murders, he said,changing the subject when asked for details. He hasn’tbeen convicted of any crime.

In 2010, as the CBI’s investigation gathered steam,Yadav said he felt guilty for his part in the scam. Hecontacted Chaturvedi, who guided him to the CBI.

“I feel less guilty now that I have come forward,”said Yadav. “I feel more at peace with myself.”

According to Chaturvedi, Yadav’s defection mayhave a less noble explanation: he feared for his lifeafter a physical altercation with Raja Bhaiya. He hadalready seen Raja Bhaiya shoot a man in the hand,Yadav said in the interview, adding that beatings ofstaff members were routine in Raja Bhaiya’sentourage.

‘A Psychopath’

“He was a psychopath,” Yadav said. “He felt reallyhappy seeing people cry.” He denied a falling-out withRaja Bhaiya.

Yadav’s statements couldn’t be independentlyconfirmed. Because the ledger has been turned in tothe CBI and the Delhi High Court as part of a swornaffidavit, Yadav would be guilty of perjury if his

statements were false. Ahmad, the CBI investigator,said he took the ledger seriously, but hadn’t hadenough time to investigate it in its entirety.

“Anybody can write anything in a diary. Yadav isacting out of a vendetta,” Raja Bhaiya’s then-spokesman Gyanendra Singh told Indian newsmagazine Tehelka, which first reported the existenceof Yadav’s ledger in April.

Since the fraud has yet to be fully investigated, theamount of food that was stolen from Uttar Pradesh’spublic distribution system may be larger than shownin Yadav’s evidence and the CBI and courtinvestigations. Only six districts have been probed,according to the CBI, out of 71 then in the state. Thoseinvestigations focused on a specific band of time–four years at the most, in the case of the CBI.

$14.5 Billion

Chaturvedi, the activist lawyer, has argued in courtthat the total theft may have been as much as $18billion. The courts have not refuted the allegation,citing it in orders and judgments during regularmonitoring of the CBI investigation.

In Gonda, the one district for which all threeinvestigative authorities have agreed upon a number,the market value of food diverted was $82 millionover a four-year period. Extrapolating over 10 yearsfor the state’s 71 districts at the time, as much $14.5billion may have been stolen. Uttar Pradesh now has75 districts.

Back in Satnapur, few of the villagers have heard ofthe probes. Nor do most realize that they are part of ascam that has run for years, and is still to becompletely extinguished.

Instead, they focus their thoughts on the stockpileof food 10 kilometers from their village.

“We dream about robbing it,” said Vaish, theactivist, as the men and women around her laughed.“We could just storm the place, and every one of uscould get a bag of rice each. Who would stop us?”

–With assistance from Rakteem Katakey andManish Modi in New Delhi

–Editors: Anne Swardson, Ben Richardson


June 14, 2012 – The death certificate for 3-year-old Rashid Ahmed hides more than it reveals.

It lists his name, misspells his mother’s andsays he died of malaria. What it doesn’t say is howlittle he weighed when he was brought to hospitalwith the disease in New Delhi one August night,how his ribs jutted from his chest, or how helplesshis doctor, 28-year-old Gyvi Gaurav, was in tryingto save him.

“It was hunger that killed him,” said Gaurav,who worked the night of August 15 at St. Stephen’sHospital and was on watch when the toddler died.“He was so weak, so malnourished, that he wouldhave died the first time he ever got really sick - -from malaria, diarrhea, anything.”

For Rashid’s mother, Nazia, the three-decaderoad from her birth to the death of her son ranalongside a slow collapse in India’s elementalstruggle to feed its people. More than three-quarters of the 1.2 billion population eat less thanminimum targets set by the government, up fromabout two-thirds, or 472 million people, in 1983.India’s failure to feed its people came as theeconomy accelerated, with gross domesticproduct per capita almost doubling in the pastdecade.

“I cry every night,” Nazia said on May 15,speaking through sobs after being told her childmay have lived had he eaten better. “For mywasted life, for my dead child, for the hunger inmy stomach. What could I give him? I hadnothing, nothing to sell.”

Calories V. Nutrition

While nutritionists and economists debate theimportance of targets defined solely in calories,other data shows gains in nourishment alsostalled. In the 2005 National Family HealthSurvey, when India last weighed, measured and

counted its children for signs of hunger, it found46 percent – 31 million – weighed too little fortheir ages, almost an entire Canada ofmalnourished under-three-year-olds. In 1999,that number was 47 percent.

Some indicators worsened: 79 percent ofchildren had anemia, against 74 percent in 1999;19 percent were wasted – weighed too little fortheir height – up from 16 percent. Anemiaprevents the absorption of nutrients; as do thediarrhea and other diseases caused by poorhygiene and sanitation.

In sheer numbers, 4 out of 10 malnourishedchildren in the world are Indian, more than in allof Africa. War-torn Sudan and famine-struckEritrea had smaller percentages of malnourishedchildren, at about 32 percent, according to theWashington-based International Food PolicyResearch Institute.

1Early Death Assured Copyright (c) 2012, Bloomberg, L.P.

BloombergNEWS

Early Death Assured in India Where 900 Million Don't Eat Enough

By Mehul Srivastava and Adi Narayan • Bloomberg News

Mohamed Hafiz Khan, left, eats lunch along with his wife , middle bot-tom, and four children in their rented home in the Dharavi slum area ofMumbai, India. Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/B loomberg

Cognitive Deficit

India’s hungry children are likely to have lowercognitive skills, grow up to be weakened workers,suffer from chronic illnesses and die prematurely,according to the United Nations Children’s Fund.Hunger stalks them into adulthood too: 21percent of all Indians are undernourished,according to Ifpri, up from 20 percent a decadeago. All of which costs the country about $68billion a year, or almost 4 percent of GDP,according to Veena S. Rao, who heads nutritioninitiatives for the government of Karnataka, theIndian state that encompasses the city ofBangalore.

“The problem of malnutrition is a nationalshame,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said inJanuary, in one of about 50 public speeches wherehe has mentioned the subject. “Despite impressivegrowth in our gross domestic product, the level ofunder-nutrition in the country is unacceptablyhigh.”

India has collected reliable and consistentnational data on nutrition since 1972, soon aftersetting minimum daily intakes of about 2,100calories a day for city residents, who are assumedto be less physically active. The level for rural-dwellers was pegged at 2,400 calories on the basis

that tilling fields, harvesting crops and drawingwater require greater exertion.

Counting Error

Only in 1999-2000 did the average urbanIndian meet the target – and that may have beendue to a counting error, according to the NationalSample Survey Office, a branch of the statisticsministry. Rural Indians never have, and have seentheir intake slide to 2,020 calories in 2010, from ahigh of 2,266 calories in 1973, according toBloomberg calculations based on data from theoffice.

A National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau studyin nine states that make up the majority of India’smalnourished population showed a steeperdecline, with average rural calorie counts fallingto about 1,900 in 2005 from 2,340 in 1979. Dailyprotein intake dropped to 49 grams (1.5 ounces)from 63 grams.

The global average is 77 grams, according to theUN’s Food and Agricultural Organization. Theworldwide average daily caloric intake is about2,800 calories a day.

Neither the diets of Nazia nor her two survivingchildren meet the averages.

Hard Life

A hard life outside Nagpur city in central India,where her husband died of tuberculosis and a failingcotton crop meant work dried up in the fields, wasfollowed by a hard life in a New Delhi slum. Afterarriving in the Indian capital 10 years ago, Naziabegged on the streets before landing work as a daylaborer on construction sites. Her third son, Rashid,was fathered by a different man.

At 5 feet and 3 inches (1.6 meters), Nazia weighs 43kilograms (95 pounds). Her hands, rough and tornfrom years of lifting bricks and balancing them on asmall turban over her head, move feverishly as sherolls wheat dough into a type of unleavened breadcalled rotis for dinner on a recent weeknight.

Sitting on the floor in their 7-foot by 8-foot home,she and her sons, Aslam, 12, and Akbar, 14, eat ahurried dinner, a bare lamp providing the only light.


Children hold bowls of sprouts outside their home in the Dharavi slumarea of Mumbai, India. Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg

The brick-built room, topped with a patchworkcorrugated metal roof in a small, illegal shanty-townbetween the Old Delhi railway station and the touristspots of the Jama Masjid and the Red Fort, smells ofold sweat and fresh sewage.

Daily Diet

Three rotis each, a gruel of potatoes and currypowder, an onion and a chili make up a typical dinner.Once a week in summer, they share two mangoes,with Nazia sucking on the flesh left around the seedafter the boys eat most of the fruit. Lunch is the same,which the boys serve themselves cold from a smallsteel container, and breakfast is tea and two slices ofcoarse white bread. It all adds up to a dailyconsumption of 1,500 calories to 1,600 calories ofmostly carbohydrates.

That places the family in the poorest quarter ofIndians in terms of nutrition, with the groupaveraging 1,624 calories a day, according toBloomberg calculations based on National SampleSurvey data. The poorest 10th on average consume1,485 calories – a little more than a McDonald’s BigMac with large Coke and large fries.

‘Blunt Tool’

Calories are a blunt tool for understandingmalnourishment, according to Angus Deaton, aPrinceton economist who has studied India closely.While gains against malnourishment largely stalledbetween 1999 and 2005, two earlier surveys showeddropping calorie counts even as nourishmentindicators improved, he said.

That suggests “the real focus should be onimproving health, not just improving calorie counts,”Deaton said in a May 21 interview.

Indian lifestyles have changed since the early1970’s, he said. More people in rural areas ownbicycles, saving energy moving around andtransporting things. Farm machinery is morewidespread, cutting down on tilling and planting byhand. Ailments like malaria and diarrhea are lesscommon as the supply of potable water improved.

“If you’re doing less manual labor, if your childrenare falling sick less often, then you need fewer

calories,” Deaton said. “This is a natural progressionof the Indian diet. Focusing just on calories ismisleading.”

‘Republic of Hunger’

Not everyone agrees. Utsa Patnaik, a professor atNew Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University andauthor of “The Republic of Hunger,” said that thedecline in calorie consumption is the result of ashortage of food availability, and a capitalist economythat hasn’t spread the benefits of India’s economicboom equitably.

Her research shows that per-capita availability ofrice, wheat and other food-grains in India has fallenfrom 177 kilograms in the early 1990s to 153 kilos in2004 – about what it was in 1934. Much of thedeterioration in food security has come after Singhbegan opening India’s economy to free-marketcompetition.

“Forty years of efforts to raise how much food-grains Indians are able to eat has been destroyed by amere dozen years of economic reform,” Patnaik said.

Riddled With Graft

The government has expanded subsidyprograms, spending about $11 billion in 2011 –


Clothes are hung out in a small alley in the Dharavi slum area ofMumbai, India. Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg

about 5 percent of the central government’s $231billion budget – to buy and distribute food atbelow-market prices to people officiallydesignated as poor.

More than 30 investigations by the NationalHuman Rights Commission, the Supreme Courtand anti-corruption agencies such as the CentralBureau of Investigation have concluded that thepublic distribution is riddled with graft. As muchas 40 percent of food purchased for the poordoesn’t reach them, according to the UN’sStanding Committee on Nutrition.

“Subsidies don’t reach the poor. Trickle-downdoesn’t reach the poor. Nothing reaches the poor,”said Yogendra Alagh, an economist in Gujaratstate who first proposed in 1972 the calorieguidelines that still govern food policy in India.“In the past two or three decades, we’ve regressedbackwards into a country that can’t evenguarantee a poor, pregnant woman a glass of milkso the next generation isn’t born stunted.”

At the same time, the number of rich isswelling. Households with more than $1 million inassets jumped 21 percent in the past year alone, aMay 31 Boston Consulting Group report shows.

Efforts to improve sanitation are struggling tokeep pace with a growing population and thespread of urban slums.

Fecal Matter

More than half of India’s population defecatedaily in fields, bushes, beaches and other openspaces, according to a 2012 report by the WorldHealth Organization and Unicef. Diarrhea amongchildren younger than 5 years accounts for morethan 47 percent of the total health-relatedeconomic impact of contaminated water anduntreated fecal matter, according to a 2010 reportby the World Bank’s Water and SanitationProgram.

Nazia’s family must pay to use a communaltoilet. The queues are often so long, the stench sooverpowering, that the boys defecate in an opensewer not far from the slum.

Every third night Nazia cooks dal, a curry oflentils common across north India, their calorie

intake increases slightly, and the boys get someprotein. On Fridays, after visiting a nearbymosque to pray, she makes a curry of eggs. Once ayear, to mark the end of the month of day-timefasting called Ramadan, she buys some mutton.

“You should see how happy they are that day,”she said. “They talk about it for weeks before, andweeks after.”

Country Life

Nazia recalls when she first moved to Delhi shethought, if nothing else, she and her childrenwould be eating more, if not better. Instead,recounting the meals she was able to pull together– with spinach from a small plot of land behindher hut, carrots when they were in season, coarsebrown rice and yoghurt from the milk of a familygoat, Nazia realizes that for her family the escapeto Delhi has been a nutritional disaster.

A detailed description of her meals in thecountry yields an intake of about 1,800 calories aday, and far more nutrients – calcium, vitamin Aand protein – than her diet in Delhi.

“If you had told me in the village that I wouldn’tget to eat any yoghurt in the city, I would havecalled you a liar,” she said, during one of eightinterviews at the family’s home.


Shabana Khan makes bread for her husband and four children attheir rented home in the Dharavi slum area of Mumbai, India.

Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg

Richer, Hungrier

Instead, her move to New Delhi made her amongthe country’s biggest losers in terms of calories. Thegreatest drop in consumption, on average, is forvillage dwellers who migrated to the cities in the past30 years. They’ve seen their intake fall to about 2,000calories a day from about 2,200 calories in a village inthe 1980s, National Sample Survey Office data show.

At the same time, Nazia’s income has doubled.She remembers living on 20 to 30 rupees (40-50cents) a day in the village, where she didn’t have topay rent. It’s a common trajectory, as traced out bythe nutrition data: Indians like Nazia have seenmeasurable increases in income, with real GDP percapita almost doubling to 48,734 rupees ($873) ayear in the past decade. And like Nazia, on average,they now consume fewer calories and lessnourishing food.

These meals eat up almost a third of the 80 cents aday Nazia earns from her work at a construction sitenear the Old Delhi railway station. Nazia said she istoo weak to labor more than four hours at a stretch.Because her children are young, they work onlyaround the house, sometimes helping neighbors withchores in exchange for handfuls of uncooked rice.

The reasons behind the decline in urban caloriesare unclear.

Urban Costs

One theory argues that much of the increasedincome from moving to cities is spent on expensesforced upon slum-dwellers. Their children fallsick more often from dirty water; they must payfor transportation to work sites; they must payrent rather than live in huts they built themselves.

“These are the costs of participating in theurban economy,” said Madhura Swaminathan, aneconomist at Kolkata’s Indian Statistical Institute.“Your increased income is canceled out byincreased expenditure. In the end, you have evenless left for food.”

That’s what happened to Mohamed HafizKhan, 40, and his family of five. In 1992, theymoved to Mumbai, joining the economic refugeeswho flock to the city at a rate of one person everyeight minutes. Most end up in slums, like the onewhere Khan lives with his wife Shabana and theirfour children.

Kerosene Prices

Khan, who works as a tailor, spends almost $90out of the $150 he makes each month on food andkerosene for the family’s stove. In 1992, he paid$6.40 a month from his $38 wage for their 12-footby 8-foot home in the Dharavi slum. This year,rent is $36 a month. His children fall sick almosttwice a month, and the doctor’s fees add up. Theirdiet deteriorated as the price of kerosene in theslum’s black market soared.

While Singh’s government subsidizes the fuel,the Khans said corrupt local officials aresiphoning off their allotment, forcing them to buyon the black market. Benchmark Asian prices ofKerosene in Singapore have risen fivefold in thepast decade.

The four children used to drink Complan orHorlicks, enriched supplements their motherwould mix with milk. They no longer do. TheKhans used to eat rice, which used up morekerosene to cook. They no longer do. They used toeat as many rotis as they wanted to. Now theyshare 12 because they can’t afford the keroseneneeded to roast them. They eat fruit maybe once


A roadside vegetable vendor arranges brinjal in the Dharavi slum areaof Mumbai, India. Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg

every two weeks. The few vegetables the localmarket provides are withered and old.

Fresh Food

Across India, the percentage of daily calorieneeds being met by fruit and vegetables droppedbetween 1993 and 2010, according to the NationalSample Survey Office. Rural families get 1.8percent of their energy from those foods, from 2percent in 1993, the data show. For city-dwellers,the share fell to 2.6 percent to 3.3 percent.

In the weeks before he died, Rashid tasted hisfirst ice cream. Older brother Akbar was given oneby a foreign tourist at the railway station, and heran back home before it could melt so he couldshare it with Rashid.

“It was the sweetest thing I’ve ever had,” saidAkbar, describing how he and Rashid licked theinside of the cardboard container, and then savedit as a reminder.

Immune System

Both Rashid’s brothers survived malaria,common in Delhi’s slums during the monsoons,when rain water pools in potholes and opensewers for the Anopheles mosquito to breed.Rashid was weaker. Aslam, in an old picture takenfor an identity card when he was three, appears tohave rounded cheeks, and his arms were thickerthan Rashid’s, his mother said. That may havebeen the result of two years when he lived with hisgrandparents in the village. When Akbar was 3,his father had been alive, and food was not thatscarce.

Staff at St. Stephen’s Hospital weighed Rashidwhen his mother brought him in, shivering fromeight hours of malaria- induced fevers. Heweighed 12 kilos and his arms were “thin assticks,” said Gaurav, the doctor.

Malnourishment had left his immune systemtoo weak to fight the parasitic disease. Hestruggled with the richer hospital food and wasn’table to properly absorb the chloroquine he wasgiven for the malaria. A saline drip helped hiscondition a little, said Gaurav, who said herecalled the night so vividly because Rashid wasthe first child to die under his care. Gaurav gavethe listless toddler medicines to lower histemperature, while mother Nazia tried to cool hisskin with dampened rags.

To boost Rashid’s energy, Gaurav tried a trickthat had worked with other children in his care: hegave an orderly the equivalent of 50 cents to buyice cream.

“He ate three in three hours,” said Nazia. On August 16, at about 3 a.m., Rashid died in

his sleep. In the refrigerator under the night shift nurse’s

desk, surrounded by fresh syringes andmedicines, a fourth cup of vanilla ice cream satuneaten.

–Editor: Ben Richardson, Jason Gale


A man holds a container of kerosene while waiting to cross a road inthe Dharavi slum area of Mumbai, India. While Singh’s governmentsubsidizes the fuel, corrupt local officials siphon off allotments, forcingfamilies to buy on the open market, which tracks global prices.


December 19, 2012 – The three untended child-sizedgraves, a few minutes’ walk from the village ofPaltupur, bear witness to what happened when thetrucks loaded with nutritional powder stoppedcoming to this desolate corner of eastern India.

Great Value Foods Ltd.’s deliveries of the tastelessyellow substance, funded by a $2 billion program forIndia’s youngest and poorest, were cut off in August.All 2-year-old Jialal’s mother had left to give her sonwas boiled rice, the only food she could afford on ayearly income of about $75.

As the days stretched into weeks, the boy keptlosing weight. His crying grew feeble. He ran fevers.He’d fall as soon as his mother, Kalavati, let go of hishand.

On Sept. 23, Jialal died, strapped to his mother’schest as she searched the countryside for help. Hewasn’t the first victim in the village, nor the last. OnAug. 20, Archna died. She was two. On Oct. 2, Anjalidied. She was two.

In a neighboring village, graves also were dug forKarishma, who died on Sept. 10 at the age of one. Andfor Raj Kamal, who was two when he died on Oct. 4.

India’s only government program to nourish asmany as 160 million children under six has failedthose from Kaushambhi district in the state of UttarPradesh, and tens of millions of others around thecountry. The billions India budgets for feedingchildren – 4.4 cents for each per day – have barelydented one of the world’s highest rates of childmalnutrition.

Instead, the program has allowed a web of privatefirms to take over distribution, in defiance of ordersfrom the Supreme Court of India. For almost a decadethe firms have delivered – or not delivered – a supplyof unpalatable powdered rations of dubiousnutritional value, according to interviews, courtdocuments and a confidential report showing onestate government has known about the theft andcorruption for more than a year.

Waving Shotgun

In Uttar Pradesh, those rations are produced in anold flour mill about 45 kilometers (28 miles) from theborder with Nepal. There, paint peels off the walls,sacks of food are stored in the open and amustachioed security guard waves a loaded shotgunat a reporter to deny him entry. More than 1,000kilometers to the west in Bhilkera, in Maharashtrastate, villager Ganesh Bilikamkale feeds powdermeant for the children to his cows because it is so badhumans won’t eat it.

“It is an appalling situation that says so muchabout the problems in our country,” said GurcharanDas, the former chief executive of the Indian unit ofProcter & Gamble Co. and the author of “India Growsat Night” (2012), a book about governmentshortcomings. “There is a moral failure here, but thefailure of governance has allowed it to happen.”

Looting Food

The dysfunction in India’s child food program,

1India Sees Children Dying Copyright (c) 2012, Bloomberg, L.P.

BloombergNEWS

India Sees Children Dying as $2 BillionProgram Proves Defective

By Andrew MacAskill and Mehul Srivastava • Bloomberg News

Hafiz Khan, left, eats lunch along with his wife, middle bottom,and four children in their rented home in the Dharavi slum area ofMumbai, India. Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg

called Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS),is just one example of how malnutrition ravages thecountry. More than three-quarters of the 1.2 billionpopulation eats less than the minimum targets set bythe government. The ratio has risen from about two-thirds in 1983.

Corrupt politicians and their criminal syndicateshave looted as much as $14.5 billion in food intendedfor public distribution to families in Uttar Pradeshalone. Food Minister K.V. Thomas cut short aninterview and asked a Bloomberg reporter to leavewhen asked about corruption in the nutrition-distribution system.

When it comes to the children’s program, thenational government and six state governments havefailed to act even after repeated warnings that therelief food was failing to arrive or was substandard. Agovernment-commissioned study said in 2011 thatabout 60 percent of the food meant for children wasbeing siphoned off along the supply chain.

Three Orders

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was told ofdefects in the program in a 2007 letter from aSupreme Court investigator and in a 2009 meetingwith commissioners to the court, according to twopeople present who asked not to be identifiedbecause they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

The Supreme Court has ordered the government ofIndia to fix issues with the food program threetimes since 2004.

In response to questions, the prime minister’soffice provided details on how the government isworking to improve the program. An October 2012plan calls for restructuring the ICDS over threeyears, increasing focus on children under three.Higher daily allowances for each child will boostexpenditures for the nutrition part of the programto $7.8 billion from the central government overthe next five years. State governments usuallymatch that.

The restructuring document didn’t clarifywhether private firms should be banned from theprocess, suggesting that various models, includingself-help groups or centralized kitchens, beconsidered, in addition to “bona fidemanufacturers.”

Implementation Issues

The program has been “well-conceived,” theplan said. “The real problem lies in itsimplementation, which arises out of inadequatefunding, lack of convergence, accountability ofthose managing and implementing theprogramme.”

“If these inadequacies are addressedappropriately, the scheme has the potential to givesatisfactory nutritional and child-developmentoutcomes.”

One of the few government bodies to have hadany success improving the system is a specialagency created by the Supreme Court. For 10 yearsit has struggled to ban private firms from thefeeding program.

The court push is part of a tradition of activismat India’s highest judicial body. Last year it orderedcompanies to stop mining in areas of mineral-richKarnataka state to protect the environment, andearlier this year it scrapped phone licenses thatwere allegedly rigged to favor certain companies.By encouraging public-interest litigation, similar toclass- action lawsuits in the U.S., the court hashelped empower marginalized Indians to claimtheir rights, including to government information.


Shanti Devi poses for a photo with her malnourished child, 13-month-old Mohit, at her hut in Paltupur village in Kaushambi dis-trict, Uttar Pradesh, India.


Orders Ignored

While the court’s commissioners on the Right toFood Campaign helped provide evidence that led tothe bust of criminal syndicates in the state ofKarnataka, the three orders from the court over fiveyears against hiring private contractors have beenignored in Indian states including Uttar Pradesh,Maharashtra, Gujarat, Haryana, Rajasthan andMeghalaya.

“It speaks volumes about the nature ofadministration in India that court orders areblatantly violated,” said Raj Kumar, a law professorand vice chancellor of O.P. Jindal Global Universityin Haryana. Until India delivers on the promise ofeconomic justice made in the constitution, “ourdemocracy will have little meaning for the vastnumber of people who are living on the margins.”

India has the highest percentage ofmalnourished children in the world except for EastTimor, according to the 2012 annual GlobalHunger Index. The report said 43.5 percent ofIndian children are underweight. It is compiled bya group of non- governmental organizationsincluding the Washington-based InternationalFood Policy Research Institute.

Faked Paperwork

About $540 million of food meant for childrenwas stolen or registered as delivered via fakedpaperwork in 2009, according to a 2011 internalreview of the program by the New Delhi-basedNational Council of Applied Economic Research(NCAER). In Uttar Pradesh state, so much wassiphoned off that each severely malnourished childreceived food worth less than a penny a day.

In both Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, India’smost populous states, most of the money has goneto private firms.

Great Value Foods has held the largest ICDScontract in Uttar Pradesh for the past seven years,according to a program document obtained underIndia’s Right to Information Act. The biggest stakein Great Value Foods was owned by a companybelonging to a liquor baron named Gurdeep SinghChadha – until he was shot and killed by his

brother last month. In Maharashtra, private companies have

exploited a loophole, intended to increase theparticipation of women’s groups, to take overfeeding contracts for the entire state.

No Vitamins

The food in both states failed to meet all but oneof the government’s prescribed nutritionalstandards, samples of the powder tested by theSupreme Court commissioner’s office found,according to court records. In Uttar Pradesh, one ofthe two samples had no vitamins, the other had noiron. In Maharashtra, none of the packetscontained any vitamin A or C. All the packets testedwere between 15 percent and 35 percent short ofthe required calorie content.

The Maharashtra government was made awareof the program’s shortcomings in late 2011, whenan investigation carried out by the MaharashtraState Commission for Protection of Child Rightsfound an “unholy nexus” between business andgovernment. There were wide discrepancies in howmuch food the providers said they were distributingand how much the children were receiving,according to a copy of the confidential report madeavailable to Bloomberg News.


A worker cooks "khichri", a hot meal of rice and lentils, at theAnganwadi center run by Integrated Child Development Servicesin the village of Semahado, Maharashtra, India.


Cow Refusal

The food being produced was inedible – and evencows appeared to refuse to eat it, the report said. TheSupreme Court’s orders on banning contractors fromthe tender process were being violated, and a fullinvestigation should be carried out by the stategovernment, the report concluded.

Maharashtra Chief Secretary J. K. Banthia wasn’tavailable to comment because of a busy schedule, aperson who answered the phone in his Nagpur officessaid. His public-relations officer, Ajay Jadhav, said byphone he couldn’t comment.

Nationally, the ICDS program is under theauspices of the Ministry of Women and ChildDevelopment in New Delhi. In a Dec. 13 interview,Minister Krishna Tirath said private contractorsweren’t involved in the program.

In almost every state, the program is working “verynicely, properly,” Tirath said in her office, estimatingthat at least 90 percent to 95 percent of the food isdelivered. “There are no contractors now, contractorsare not there.”

Immunization Success

When questioned about the failure of food to arrivein Kaushambi, she blamed it on “one or two” ICDSworkers. This isn’t a “true” picture, she said. As for

Gurdeep Singh Chadha, the late liquor magnatewhose company was involved in the Uttar Pradeshcontract, she said she hadn’t known that.

Tirath’s deputy, joint secretary Shree Ranjan, saidthat viewing the ICDS only as a feeding programdistorts its achievements, which include high rates ofimmunization for children, education of mothers inhow to take care of their children and encouragementfor school enrollment.

Ranjan also said the ministry rejects the NCAER’sfindings that 60 percent of the food for children issiphoned off. The report’s sample size was too smalland its methods were flawed, he said.

When first implemented in 1975, the ICDS wasintended to give poor children a daily nutritious mealon the premises of their schools. They would beoverseen by a trained supervisor who watched theirweight, provided their mothers with nutrition adviceand watched for especially needy cases, programdocuments from the period said.

Nutrition Powder

Until the early 1990s, the program worked asplanned, although it hadn’t spread to include all ofIndia’s children, according to a World Bank reviewdone in 2001. By the mid-1990s, though, privatecontractors were beginning to get state contracts toprovide food. They provided nutritional powder orbiscuits, not meals.

The first of a series of lawsuits challenging theIndian government’s delivery of food to its peoplecame in 2001, when an advocacy group, the People’sUnion for Civil Liberties, sued. In 2004, 2006 and2009, the Supreme Court responded by banningprivate contractors from participating in the ICDSfood program.

Uttar Pradesh has entrusted Great Value Foods toprovide nutrition for the state’s children since 2005.The company holds two contracts with the stategovernment under the ICDS program, according to aJanuary 2011 ratings report by India’s credit ratingagency, ICRA Ltd. The company was to provide 7,200tons monthly of enriched food for adolescent girls andpregnant mothers and 6,400 metric tons monthly ofweaning food, which is given to children under theage of three.


In Uttar Pradesh, Great Value Foods, whic failed to deliver thepowder to Jialal’s village, has held the largest ICDS contrac forthe past seven years.


Brotherly Shootout

Based in New Delhi, Great Value Foods wasdescribed in a 2009 credit-agency document as beingalmost 60 percent owned by a group of companiescalled Chadha Group, now named Wave Group.

Chadha, known as Ponty Chadha, was killed in a15-minute gun battle at one of his luxury farmhouseresidences near New Delhi by his brother over aproperty dispute on Nov. 17. The brother was thenshot dead by Chadha’s security guards, the New Delhipolice said in a statement.

Chadha traveled with armed guards and courtedpolitical leaders across party lines. In 2009, hereceived a state monopoly on liquor deals, UttarPradesh Excise Commissioner Mahesh Kumar Guptasaid in a Dec. 14 phone interview. Chadha also boughtsugar mills from the Uttar Pradesh government athalf of market prices, according to a 2012 audit by theComptroller and Auditor General of India.

‘Questionable Reputation’“It is obvious that the contract was not given for

benevolent reasons, why would you give it to abusinessman with such a questionable reputation?”said Jagdeep Chhokar, a former professor at theIndian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad andthe Association for Democratic Reforms, which hascampaigned for better governance since 1999. “This is

the way that politics is done in U.P. and all overIndia.”

Chadha’s other brother, Rajinder Singh Chadha,succeeded him as head of Wave Group, formerlyChadha Group, which owns the Great Value Foodsstake.

Great Value Foods has a factory about 11 hours’drive from Kaushambhi, the district where thetoddlers died. In early December, the factory, whichsports the Great Value Foods name in foot-high blueletters on a wall and the entrance, could be seen tohave a storage unit and a production facility inside awalled compound about 300 meters by 100 meters.

Barred Gate

No management officials were available to meetwith visitors, said a man with a holstered revolverwho gave his name as Ramesh Bali. He had beensummoned by the security guard with the shotgun.Behind the barred gate, about 800 50-kilogram (110-pound) sacks of grain were stored in the open.

In February 2011, an investigator for the NationalHuman Rights Commission was granted entry to thefactory during a surprise inspection. The investigator,whose name wasn’t released in his final investigativereport, didn’t mince words as he noted that at thefactory that day there weren’t enough grains to meetdaily production targets.

“There is an apology of a laboratory which onlychecks moisture content,” he wrote. “It has none ofthe cleanliness and attention to hygiene that onewould expect in such a factory. The factory issupposed to be regularly inspected, but the supplierhas too much clout for officers to want to meddle withhim. On the whole, a most unusual place in which toproduce what six-month-olds will be consuming.”

The human rights commission investigation foundthrough a chemical analysis that the powdered foodbeing given to the children didn’t contain theingredients required by the government in its initialcontract.

Weaning Food

Children between six months and three years weresupposed to get 125 grams daily of a micronutrient-


Packets of nutrition powder funded by a $3 billion program forIndia’s youngest and poorest.


fortified weaning food that had at least 500 caloriesand 16 grams of protein. The proportions to achievethat, listed in the document released by the UttarPradesh government: 34 percent wheat, 18 percentsoya powder, 5 percent corn flour, 12 percent rice, 25percent sugar, 5 percent oil and 1 percent ofadditional vitamins and minerals.

Bloomberg News e-mailed Barbora Delinic,spokeswoman for the Wave Group. A personrepresenting Perfect Relations, a New Delhi-basedpublic relations company, who asked not to be namedbecause she wasn’t a spokeswoman for the company,said Dec. 14 that she would speak with Wave Groupofficials to provide comment. On Dec. 17, the personsaid Wave Group doesn’t own Great Value foods, andthus couldn’t provide comment.

An undated company description on a WaveGroup website says it has a “partnership” with GreatValue Foods and the credit agency put Great ValueFoods on rating watch because of “the demise of thepromoter of the group Mr Gurdeep Singh Chadha.”

Apartment Building

While Great Value Foods doesn’t have a listedphone number or website, a freedom of informationact request showed it is headquartered in an upscaleresidential area of south Delhi. The building is a four-story apartment building with balconies on each level

at the front and back. In the basement, filing cabinetssat behind a meshed fence as 10 to 15 people worked.

A man who said his name was Bidesh Guptaconfirmed the building was an office of Great ValueFoods and asked a Bloomberg News reporter whovisited his office on Dec. 17 to return the next day.When two reporters did so he wasn’t there.

Shree Sadakanth, the director of the Uttar PradeshWomen and Child Development Ministry, which runsthe program at the state level, declined a request foran interview. His deputy, Brij Mohan, initially agreedto an interview with Bloomberg News, but didn’tallow reporters into his office after they had provideda list of questions at his request.

Mud Huts

The chief coordinator for the Uttar Pradesh ICDS,Shambhu Nath, said he was too busy to meet withreporters, and didn’t answer a set of questions thatwere faxed to him. Sadakanth and Nath didn’t returnphone calls on Dec. 14.

The district of Kaushambhi, where Great ValueFoods holds the ICDS contract, is two hours’ drivedown a bumpy road from the holy city of Allahabad.The villages here are clusters of small, mud huts.Open sewers run alongside the road, and the smell offeces is thick. Villagers defecate in the fields, and theiranimals – cows, pigs and goats – defecateeverywhere.

In Jialal’s village, none of the dozen mothersinterviewed had heard of Great Value Foods. Jialal’smother, Kalavati, can’t read, and has never traveledmore than two hours’ drive from the nearby villagethat she was born in.

In late July, Jialal had weighed about 6.8kilograms, about half the weight of a healthy baby ofthat age, according to a field survey carried out by alocal nonprofit group that was looking for signs ofmalnourishment in Kaushambhi. Jialal, and the fourother children who died in the months after thepowder deliveries stopped, all weighed too little fortheir age, according to data the group collected.

Sick Baby

While supplies had been erratic all year, deliveries


Children eat a meal of lentils for breakfast at the Anganwadi cen-ter run by Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) in thevillage of Semahado, Maharashtra, India.


stopped entirely in August, ICDS central blockdevelopment project officer Saritha Rai said at heroffice Dec. 7. Her superior, district project officerSantosh Srivastava, confirmed the three-monthstoppage in a phone interview on Dec. 17.

Kalavati wasn’t counting. What she did know backin September was that her child was sick. Herhusband was away in a nearby village looking forwork the night Jialal was running a fever whose originshe couldn’t determine.

On the evening of Sept. 23, she picked up her childand went to seek help. She walked two kilometersthrough the wheat fields, then across a small bridgeover a river. Jialal, his breath shallow and his browhot, was wrapped in a cloth against her chest. By thetime Kalavati reached the small clinic, the skies weregrowing dark. She had walked just over fivekilometers.

No Doctor

The rudimentary clinic has a temple toHanuman, a Hindu monkey god, in the front yardand six cots in the back. In the small examiningroom during a reporter’s visit Dec. 7, a bare bulbshone on cigarette butts and red stains from betelnut that people have spat out. Empty bags of salinedrip dangled from metal hooks above the bed, theonly visible medical equipment in the entire clinic

other than a rusted blood pressure monitor. The clinic is run by Suresh Kumar, whom the

villagers call doctor. He isn’t. He has a degree inbiomedical engineering from the University ofLucknow, a sign in English says on the back of adoor. When asked about his degree, Kumar said thesign was mistaken, and that his degree was from alocal institute that lost its accreditation.

The clinic is the only medical facility near thevillage – a government-run hospital is 17kilometers away.

“The child was very weak, almost dead,” he saidof Jialal, sitting straight in his chair and fiddlingwith the blood pressure monitor. “This is a verysmall clinic. We don’t do much here other thandiagnose coughs and colds. So I told her to take himto the hospital in Allahabad.”

Two Pigs

Kalavati remembers Kumar examining Jialal. “He said to me that I should bring all my money,

as much as I can, two or three thousand rupees ($35-$55) and take him to the city,” said Kalavati, weepingin the small courtyard of her mud hut. Two pigs – thefamily’s sole source of income – ate chaff near theentrance. Last year, she and her husband earned nomore than $75 raising pigs, she said. Her life savingsof about $73 had been spent the previous Januarywhen her three- year-old daughter fell sick.

And so, she picked up her son, wrapped the cloththat held him to her and started the walk back to hervillage.

“Suddenly,” she said, “he felt lighter.” Jialal was dead.

Hindu Grave

Before the sun came up on Sept. 24, the boy’s bodywas wrapped in cloth and lowered into a grave undera tree in the field near Kalavati’s home, according toRehaan, a worker at the nonprofit group whoattended the prayer ceremonies. Hindus bury, ratherthan cremate, small children. Their souls are believedto be sinless, and don’t need the purifying funeralpyre to start the cycle of reincarnation.

“The job of the ICDS is to keep these children


Kalavati Devi cleans rice in Paltupur village in Kaushambi district,Uttar Pradesh, India.


healthy and it failed completely,” said Parvez Rizvi,secretary of the nonprofit, Doaba Vikas Evam UtthanSamiti Ltd., which carried out the survey of thechildren’s weights and mortality. “If the program wasworking, if the food was reaching the children, wouldthese babies have died? No.”

Not only has the child-food program failed todeliver food for Jialal and tens of millions like him,across large swathes of India the program doesn’tfunction at all. Only 79 million of the nation’s 160million children are officially enrolled, according tofigures from the Ministry of Women and ChildDevelopment.

Daily Deaths

The poor northern states, including UttarPradesh, that account for nearly half of India’spopulation and suffer from the highest rates of childmalnutrition have the lowest levels of funding,according to data compiled by Bloomberg fromgovernment reports.

One in every three malnourished children lives inIndia and about 50 percent of all childhood deaths areattributed to malnutrition, according to Unicef. In2011, 1.7 million children under the age of five died inIndia, about 5,000 a day.

Of those 5,000, at least half die of malnutrition-related causes often associated with infectiousdiseases, according to Child in Need India, a London-based charity. Another 11 percent die from diarrhea,which further weakens children as their body isunable to absorb nutrition.

In only a few places in India does the feedingprogram provide hot meals. In the Maharashtradistrict of Melghat, children eat steaming rice and dalin a feeding center in the village of Semahado. Beforea 2011 state court order, they were fed daily fistfuls ofnutritional powder.

For many of the 40 children, this is the only timethey will get any vegetables. It’s one of their two mealsa day.

Budget-Stretching

Aethi Sanjil Dhinkal, 22, who has three daughtersand earns money collecting firewood, says the

program helps her stretch the family’s $18.40 budgetthrough the month.

The children have no toys and they live in a one-bedroom hut without any beds and a leaky roof. Onthe wall hangs a picture of Lakshmi, the Hindu god ofwealth.

“If the program closed, our children may have togo without food,” said Dhinkal.

Vandana Prasad, a doctor who is a member of theNational Commission for the Protection of ChildRights, said it is one of the better programs in India.

“The court case has made a big difference,” saidPrasad, who visited the program in Melghat lastmonth. “With proper supervision it shows you howthe program can be run.”

That feeding program is now being tested in theSupreme Court, where private contractors arechallenging the Melghat state-court decision. Thelawsuit may help decide whether India will continueto use private firms to feed children the pre- cookedmixtures, or whether government distributionchannels will provide them with hot meals cooked inlocal centers.

Political Connections

A Bloomberg News review of thousands ofdocuments shows how politically connected familiesin Maharashtra repeatedly violated the Supreme


Rita Tiparde, an anganwadi worker, stands with food rations atthe anganwadi center run by Integrated Child DevelopmentServices in the village of Semahado, Maharashtra, India.


Court’s 2004 order that private contractors beexcluded from ICDS contracts.

The loophole comes through a state governmentdecision to encourage women-run organizations. Achange to the definition of women-run in 2009 forpurposes of the children’s program allowed anyprivate firm that has female leadership to bid. Thatyear 100 percent of the state contracts to feed childrentake-home rations were won by three suchorganizations.

Husband Power

After the contracts were awarded, the boards ofeach of those organizations became dominated bythe wives and other female relatives of politicallyconnected Maharashtra men, according todocuments filed in the case.

Six of the 13 women directors of one of thecompanies, Venkateshwara Mahila AudyogikUtpadak Sahakari Sanstha Ltd., were members oftwo families, according to voter records filed withthe case.

Satish Munde, the husband of one of thedirectors, is the cousin of Gopinath Munde, apolitical leader at the state level with the BharatiyaJanata Party, according to a news report by Indianwebsite rediff.com. Gopinath Munde was amember of the Maharashtra state legislature from1990 to 2009.

Munde, in a short phone conversation, deniedSatish was his cousin and said he was a friend.

Venkateshwara subcontracted the work out totwo companies, one of which lists Munde as itsmanaging director, and another that is owned bythe husband of another committee member,according to documents in the case. Under theSupreme Court’s orders, these companies wouldn’thave been allowed to win the contract, according toarguments by the Supreme Court’s commissioner’soffice.

Confidential Investigation

The two other women-led firms that wonMaharashtra state contracts entered into similarsubcontracting agreements, according to court

documents. The discrepancies in how the three firms carried

out the contracts caught the attention of theMaharashtra Co-Operative Department, whichinvestigated one of the companies. In the 13- pageconfidential report filed with the Supreme Court, itlisted violations including transgressions of financialrecord-keeping, not keeping inventories of food andhoarding profits.

“Despite seven years having passed since theSupreme Court banning contractors from the ICDSprogram, this politician- bureaucrat-contractor nexushas managed to violate the orders of this court withimpunity,” Biraj Patnaik, a principal adviser to theSupreme Court’s right-to-food campaign, wrote to thecourt. “That this system continues shows the level ofinfluence that private contractors have on the leversof power in the state.”

Swollen Bellies

Venkateshwara holds the contract to supply foodto the villages of Bhilkera, two hours’ drive fromMelghat. Unlike the children of Melghat, Bhilkera’stoddlers get powdered rations.

The powder is so bad, villagers say, that it isn’tgiven to the children because they get stomachcramps and diarrhea. The results are visible: swollenbellies and ribs that can be counted.

By the village entrance, next to a shrine to LordShiva, the Hindu deity of destruction, GaneshBilikamkale is feeding the powder to his cattle. As thebrown cows lick the powder, stick-thin children playnearby.

Bilikamkale, who says he receives about 20kilograms of the food a month for free from the ICDScenter, says it is better not to waste it.

“The cows love it but then they will eat anything,”said Bilikamkale. “No human should be made to eatthis stuff, particularly not children.”

Back in the cluster of villages where Jialal lived,1,200 kilometers away, the rations Great Value Foodshas restarted delivering for 10,092 children sit behinda padlocked door. The trucks brought 524 50-kilogram sacks of weaning food, meant to last amonth. But there were no morning snacks orenriched food.


Insufficient Supply

Total supply should have been almost 2 1/2 timeslarger, said Saritha Rai, the child-developmentproject officer of that block of villages.

In her village, Jialal’s mother holds out the smallbowl of uncooked rice that she will boil over firewoodto feed her two remaining children and crippledhusband. She had also borrowed money from aneighbor to buy a few potatoes and an onion.

A few houses down, not far from the unmarkedpatch of earth where the toddlers are buried, 13-

month-old Mohit cries against his mother’s chest. Heweighs just over five kilograms, about half what achild his age should. His head is too heavy for hisneck; his legs are too thin for him to crawl.

“He needs help now, some food, anything,” said hismother, Shanti Devi, wrapping Mohit up in aborrowed sweater and a woolen hat against a coldbreeze. “And soon.”

–Editors: Anne Swardson, Ben Richardson


October 22, 2012 – India’s system of distributing foodto the poor isn’t corrupt, according to Food MinisterK.V. Thomas, who rejected findings by the WorldBank, Supreme Court and news investigations thatrampant theft is depriving as many as 160 millionfamilies of nourishment.

About 5 percent to 10 percent of the food meantfor the poor is lost, and that is due tomismanagement, Thomas said in an interview athis office in New Delhi. The World Bank pegged thefigure at 58 percent, in a 2011 report based ongovernment data, and blamed it on graft andwastage. A Supreme Court fact- findingcommission declared in the past year that thedistribution system in major states had failed in itsmission.

“I am not concerned about the World Bank,”said Thomas. There is “some kind ofmismanagement there, I do agree with that, but notto the extent of an alarming stage,” the ministersaid, growing visibly angry at questions oncorruption before abruptly ending the half-hourinterview. “I don’t agree with the word corruption.”

The government will spend a record $14 billionthis fiscal year on wheat, rice and other food,adding to an 82 million ton stockpile in a countrywhere half the children and one in five adults aremalnourished. While some rots in inadequatestorage facilities, still more is siphoned off bycorrupt politicians and their criminal gangs, datacompiled by Bloomberg in August showed. Asmuch as $14.5 billion of food meant for the poorwas looted over a decade in the state of UttarPradesh alone.

‘Shocking’

“It is shocking that someone in his position is notwilling to accept the scale of the problem,” saidNaresh Saxena, a commissioner of the Supreme

Court who monitors hunger- based programsacross the country. “I think he is very badlymisinformed. This is a very worrying sign.”

Sitting behind a large, wooden desk in his officeoverlooking the Rajpath, the ceremonial avenuerunning between the presidential palace and thememorial arch called India Gate, Thomas grewincreasingly agitated at questions about the failings inthe system he has overseen for the past two years.

Thomas said it wasn’t his responsibility to probeindividual cases of corruption and it was down tothe state government to ensure the food reaches thepoor and the national government only deliversgrain from warehouses.

“I don’t depend on news stories,” he said in theOct. 17 interview.

When asked whether he was surprised by thelevel of corruption in the distribution system andwhether he felt frustrated by his inability to combatit, Thomas asked to change the topic. “Let us forgetabout this and leave this subject,” he said.

1India Minister Denies Copyright (c) 2012, Bloomberg, L.P.

BloombergNEWS

India Minister Denies Theft Rampant in $14 Billion Food Program

By Andrew MacAskill and Mehul Srivastava • Bloomberg News

Children hold bowls of sprouts outside their home in the Dharavislum area of Mumbai, India. The government will spend a record$14 billion this fiscal year on wheat, rice and other food, addingto an 82 million ton stockpile in a country where half the childrenand one in five adults are malnourished.


Food Corporation

India has run the world’s largest public fooddistribution system for the poor since the failure oftwo successive monsoons led to the creation of theFood Corporation of India in 1965. As the countrymoved from a precarious existence depending onmonsoon rains and overseas aid to one of surplusand exporter- status today, it has largely failed todent some of the world’s worst malnourishmentstatistics.

The Planning Commission, a governmental bodythat assesses the country’s resources in the struggleto improve living conditions, asked the World Bankin 2005 to survey India’s social security safety nets.The commission had already found that 36 percentof subsidized grains were “siphoned off the supplychain.” In fiscal 2004, $791 million worth of food,out of $1.4 billion set aside for 16 states, didn’treach the poor.

Fake Cards

The World Bank used data from the commissionand the National Sample Survey Organization, abranch of the Statistics Ministry. Among thefindings of the bank’s report, only published lastyear, was that as much as 36 percent of the foodmeant for those below the poverty line in the early

2000s was diverted or disappeared in thedistribution channels set up by the government. Afurther 22 percent was sold to people with fakeration cards, who did not qualify for the subsidy.

Using another method, comparing the amountof rice and wheat given to each state to distributewith the amount citizens reported buying fromration stores, only 41 percent of the food meant forthe poor was consumed by them in 2005.

While there were wide variations across states,the World Bank had noticed some improvementover time, according to an e- mailed statementfrom New Delhi-based lead economist JohnBlomquist.

“Nonetheless, overall, the leakage rates remainrelatively high for India as a whole,” saidBlomquist.

‘Gigantic Proportion’

A continuing examination of the publicdistribution system ordered by the Supreme Courtand headed by Justice D. P. Wadhwa has examined22 Indian states. The system had “fallen into ashambles” with large-scale diversion onto the blackmarket, Wadhwa declared. The number of forgedration cards in Andhra Pradesh led to “a fraud ofgigantic proportion.”

The food minister “is detached from reality,” saidMohan Guruswamy, chairman of the Centre forPolicy Alternatives in New Delhi, who has writtenabout changes needed for the public distributionsystem. “He should own up to the problem and say heis going to do something to rectify it. ”

India’s Cabinet this month approved a $745million program to computerize public distribution offood. The system will be modeled on pilot programsin states like Chattisgarh and Kerala that haveintroduced photo-identity cards, said Thomas.

‘Ask the Experts’

The first phase, already under way, allows grainshipments to be tracked from central governmentwarehouses to state godowns, and then onward tothe approximately 400,000 Fair Price Shops wherecitizens purchase their subsidized quotas. This


A pedestrian walks past a closed fair price shop in Gomti Nagar,Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, India.


process is a year behind schedule, said Thomas,who expects it to be completed by 2013.

In a second phase, the shops themselves will begiven computerized systems, where photo-identitycards issued under a separate biometric I.D.program run by the government will be used tomonitor rationing to individuals. This processcould be further delayed if the identity-card pushdoes not complete the process of registering theentire population, said Thomas.

When asked about the benefits computerizationwould bring, he said: “Go talk to some experts.”

Thomas, 66, who is a professor in chemistry andran the department at Sacred Heart College in thesouthern state of Kerala for two decades, declinedto comment on specific measures he had taken toimprove the distribution system or assess hisperformance since taking over the ministry. “I amnot going to make an assessment of that,” Thomassaid. “We are doing it better, things haveimproved.”

Satisfied

Thomas also said he was satisfied with thesystem of leaving it up to individual states todistribute food, while his ministry overseesprocurement. In Uttar Pradesh, that meansThomas’s ministry works with the state food

minister, Raghuraj Pratap Singh, who standscharged with attempted murder, kidnapping,armed robbery and electoral fraud.

“We have a democratic system in the country, wehave state governments and state governmentsmay be run by different parties, but I cannot go intoall those things,” Thomas said. “This is a federalstructure. We have to respect the stategovernments. We can only suggest, we cannotimpose.”

In Uttar Pradesh, home to the largest number ofpoor and malnourished people in India, as much as100 percent of the food in several districts waslooted, according to the Central Bureau ofInvestigation. One politician, O.P. Gupta, the locallegislative representative from the district ofSitapur, was indicted for the theft. He died in Apriland his son says he was innocent. A whistleblower,Rajeev Yadav, told Bloomberg News that Singhreceived as much as $200,000 a week as his cutfrom the scam. Singh has not been charged over thefood theft and has denied any wrongdoing.

Corruption Perception

Seventy-four percent of Indians believe that thecountry has grown more corrupt, and only aquarter feel that the government of Prime MinisterManmohan Singh has been effective in fightinggraft, according to Transparency International’s2010 Global Corruption Barometer. Indiansconsider political parties to be the most corruptinstitutions in the country, the report said.

“I compliment our system, because with such ahuge population and different terrains we are ableto distribute the food grains satisfactorily,” Thomassaid.

After being asked about how thecomputerization of the distribution system wouldhelp reduce corruption, Thomas tossed his papersdown on the desk, picked up his phone and calledan assistant to escort the British-born BloombergNews reporter from the office.

“If you put questions like this” then the interviewhas to end, Thomas said. “I wish you would not putit like this. Sorry, we should stop with this now.”

Foreign journalists have an agenda to portray


A day laborer walks past piles of covered grains and trucks ladenwith grains at an open storage area of the Uttar Pradesh statewarehouse in Mishrikh in Uttar Pradesh, India.


India in a negative light, he said. “You should not paint India as a corrupt

country,” Thomas said, jabbing his fingers as hisassistant ushered the reporter from the room. “Weare the largest democracy in the world and doing a lotbetter than Western nations.”

–Editors: Ben Richardson, Peter Hirschberg


A day laborer moves a sack of rice at the Uttar Pradesh statewarehouse in Mishrikh in Uttar Pradesh, India.


Documents

Bloomberg€¦ · October 23, 2012 – It was 1958, my father was still a child, and India was running out of food. That year’s wheat crop had slumped by 15 percent,