#DNAEdit: Many a slip between the cup and the lip

In the Alirajpur region of rural Madhya Pradesh, villagers have started having tea without milk. Those who can afford to, buy the twenty rupees packs of milk powder that have started to make an appearance in the local stores. It is a state in which the introduction of eggs in the mid-day meal scheme is hotly contested. Eat protein through pulses, the administration dismissively says often enough, as though the average villager, who can't afford the milk for his tea, has the luxury of chewing through the 200 gms of pulses that he would require to eat to achieve a Recommended Dietary Allowance of daily protein. Besides, locals say their kids no longer just want the plain jane dal and rotis they used to eat.

Televisions beam in a new world, and they, like anyone else susceptible to suggestion, crave chips and sodas and junk food like every other Indian. So despite the growth in cereals, that's not what anyone, not even the poor wants to eat more of. Which is why a study by SNEHA found acute malnutrition caused by eating the wrong things, in Dharavi, in the heart of Mumbai a couple of years ago. We once blamed the hunger in the country on the lack of food. There just wasn't enough to go around. In 1950-51, we produced 50.8 mn tonnes of food. It took us till 1970-71 to double that, when we were producing a total of 108 mn tonnes of food grains.

Today, thanks to science and technology, and modernisation, we produce 252.22 mn tonnes of food. Institutions like Agricultural Research Institute (ARI), and Indian Agricultural Research Institute (ICAR), we have increased seed varieties and hardiness and matched seed with terrain to bring around 156 mn hectares under cultivation. But people are still going hungry.

According to Global Hunger Index released by the International Food Policy Research (IFPRI) ahead of World Food Day, India ranks 97 among 118 developing nations. 15.2% of Indians go hungry and 38.7% of children under 5 remain stunted. That's 194.6 mn people. We have more hungry people than all our neighbours. As onions rot in the godowns outside Nasik fifteen years after People's Union for Civil Liberties filed its first petition in the Right to Food case that redistributed excess grain, we need to ask if there is more to assuaging hunger than merely creating more of everything. Millets were included into the PDS system, only to be rejected by those who viewed millet as a caste food and sought the aspirational white rice. Today, there is a concerted movement away from cereal. We rage against eggs and beef and other foods made easily available in large quantities to the poor on grounds other than assuaging hunger. Perhaps we focus on fixing the wrong things.