Bemoan This Fete

For instance, the office of the Supreme Court’s commissioners in the right-to-food case—N.C. Saxena and Harsh Mander—has collected nearly a hundred cases of starvation deaths in Bihar, as reported in the local media between January 2006 and December 2009, the very period recording extraordinary growth in the state. Going through the list, one finds that these deaths have occurred with unnerving frequency despite the media regularly bringing these deaths to the state government’s notice. In many cases, the facts have been verified by the local advisor of the Supreme Court commissioners. It’s pertinent, in this regard, to consider the pattern pointed out by the hunger monitoring team of a few NGOs in the starvation death cases in Rattubigha Tola, in Jehanabad district, and the Jhawana Tola village, in Nalanda district. Of the three people who died in Rattubigha, one man and one woman were from Dalit castes, while a third man was from an extremely backward caste. In Jhawana Tola, it was a Dalit woman and her one-year-old child who died. There was complete non-implementation of hunger and poverty ameliorating government schemes, despite orders from, and monitoring by, the apex court. In both villages:

• The poorest of the poor had not received their quota of extremely subsidised grain under the Antyodaya Anna Yojana from the ration shop for months. Nor had other BPL families received their quota of subsidised grain under the Targeted Public Distribution System.
• People holding legitimate job cards had not got even a day’s work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Others had not been given job cards at all despite being eligible, and yet others had been asked to pay for their photos, something clearly illegal.
• The poor had not been given sanctioned housing assistance under the Indira Awas Yojana.
• Women and children had not been given supplementary nutrition under the Integrated Child Development Services.
• Benefits under the National Old Age Pension Scheme had not been granted.
• The school midday meal scheme was dysfunctional, with untouchability being rife.

The office of the local advisor of the Supreme Court commissioners detected a similar pattern in other cases too. This was corroborated by a statistical comparison of Bihar’s performance with 14 other states, which they referred to in their ninth report submitted to the apex court. For instance, Bihar was at the bottom of the list with Rajasthan in providing supplementary nutrition to children under six—less than 40 per cent of children got supplementary nutrition in these two states. In fact, Bihar was at the bottom with Uttarakhand in ICDs expenditure too, spending only Rs 2.40 per beneficiary. Bihar also provided less than 10 days work per household under nregs, and shared the grossly underperforming bottom half of the list with Gujarat, Maharashtra, West Bengal, J&K and Orissa. Bihar also figured at the bottom in the offtake (38.5 per cent) of grains for the midday meal scheme. In pds too, its rice offtake of 36.37 per cent and that of wheat at 63.1 per cent was the lowest. Besides, the state, along with Andhra Pradesh and Nagaland, doesn’t cover home deliveries under maternity benefits. In Old Age Pensions too, Bihar emerged an underperformer, doling out just Rs 200 and covering less than 70 per cent. In the list of ration cards per fair price shop, Bihar was last but one, with 179 cards per fps.

This is not to say that Bihar didn’t emerge favourably vis-a-vis other states on other counts. We have deliberately quoted statistics of underperformance to demonstrate the gap between growth and poverty amelioration, between prosperity at the top and hunger and wretchedness at the bottom, between top-down policies and implementation at the grassroots. It’s a gap that could very well destabilise Bihar again, as also Nitish’s politics, if not addressed properly.