It was the summer of 2020. With the pandemic raging across an India under a hard lockdown, journalist Daya Sagar was reporting from Uttar Pradesh, when he discovered the “Parle-G girl”. Not the cherub on the packaging of the biscuit brand—which had itself generated a fair bit of controversy and fake news a few years ago—but the year-and-a-half-old Preeti—who hit the headlines for having survived only on Parle-G dipped in water for five days.
Preeti was not alone. Sagar recalls that in those days, it was quite common to find migrant families feeding their children Parle-G to keep them alive. “It was not their first choice. But there simply was nothing else to eat,” he says.
During the pandemic, as sales of all biscuits and cookies shot up, the brand that scripted a real success story was Parle-G. With millions unable to afford basic amenities due to sudden, often total, loss of income, Parle-G sold by the carton. That year, Parle logged record sales.
Parle-G was launched in the British era when biscuits were not part of the Indian palate. “Biscuits were a European snack,” says Mayank Shah, senior category head of Parle Products. “Parle-G changed that. It has now become a staple in India,” he adds.
Much of it has to do with its affordability. The smallest packet of Parle-G costs just Rs 2. There are roughly 260 calories in 12 Parle-G biscuits. The Rs 30 pack contains 30 biscuits. According to global estimates, 1,200 calories is considered the minimum intake a person needs to survive.
“It’s all we could afford,” says Raju, a Bihari migrant labourer who was stuck in Delhi for two months before he ran out of money and decided to walk home. “A packet of Parle-G gives an energy boost. We walked miles in the hot sun and ate anything we got. And Parle-G is available everywhere,” he adds. This was no small feat for the original ‘Make in India’ brand that has survived the Partition, a generational shift in tastes and the widening rich-poor gap.
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Parle Products started in 1929, about two decades after the Swadeshi movement began. Its founder Mohanlal Dayal Chauhan, who lived in Mumbai’s Vile Parle (named after the company), wanted to contribute to the growing nationalist movement by creating a ‘swadeshi’ brand that would not only provide Indians with indigenous alternatives to British products, but also ensure affordability for all.
Parle-G remains popular because of its affordability. But it also reveals a murkier reality—India’s lack of a safety net and food security.
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When PM Narendra Modi announced the lockdown on March 24, 2020, about 1.4 billion Indians had just four hours’ notice to stock up on essentials. But even as products flew off supermarket shelves, the poor found themselves in long queues outside ration shops. By the next day, when the seriousness of it all had started sinking in, thousands decided to walk home. And a Rs 2 Parle-G packet was all that many could afford. Behind the pandemic success story of Parle-G is the Indian State’s failure to provide food security to its weakest stakeholders.
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“It was madness. Migrants were crisscrossing the country. There was no arrangement for their livelihood, food or lodging. When we went to feed 1,000 hungry people, we found 10,000 waiting in queue,” recalls Ranchi-based Right To Food activist Akash Ranjan. In the initial months of the lockdown, Ranjan and his team were actively involved in providing rations to poor families on the move.
“We crowd-funded the rations and tried to ensure a steady supply of essentials like food grains, pulses and mustard oil to as many families as we could,” Ranjan says. He adds that Parle-G was not part of their relief packages. “We tried to include food with more nutritional value,” he says.
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Despite their evident ease of transportation, extensive availability and long shelf life, Parle-G biscuits, according to Delhi-based nutritionist Ishi Khosla, are not the best form of sustenance. “It is ultimately junk food made out of sugar and fats. It will help you survive, but prolonged consumption can cause adverse health issues,” Khosla adds.
She elaborates that it is not that hard or expensive to provide basic, nutritious meals to the poor. “Rice cakes with jaggery, khichdi, boiled potatoes or even bananas are better options. They are cheap and clean sources of nutrition.” The problem, she feels, is not with Parle-G but with using calories as the only metric for nutrition. In India, a person who consumes less than 2,100-2,400 calories is considered Below Poverty Line. But Khosla asserts that just loading on calories without considering the source of the calories or maintaining a balanced diet can be counter-productive. But, as Akash Ranjan puts it, “Parle-G is cheaper than grains or vegetables.”
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Civil society and governments have a wide variety of options to choose from when distributing relief. However, those receiving the rations often have no choice over what they get. While images and videos of people surviving on Parle-G (which also distributed 3 crore free biscuits in 2020) evoked shock and pity, 43-year-old domestic worker Saima Khatoon hopes that her children don’t have to survive on Parle-G and dry rations again. During the lockdown, she and her husband were forced out of work. Saima’s ration card, like that of thousands of migrant workers, was back at her village in Malda, West Bengal, making her ineligible for government aid. “We survived for months on the kindness of one of my employers, who loaded us with Parle-G out of affection for the kids,” she adds.
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RTI activist Anjali Bhardwaj—who has been working with thousands of migrant families like Saima’s in Delhi-NCR who fall outside the ambit of food security schemes and government benefits due to lack of documentation—says not much has changed in two years since the pandemic, and that one of the key reasons migrants had to survive on biscuits or go without food was their inability to access State-run relief. “Many migrants who come to big cities often don’t have proper documentation. The process of getting the right papers is time consuming, and those from the weakest strata often fall through the net.” She also feels that though the impact of the pandemic was evident, both central and state governments failed to learn any lessons from the pandemic.
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Despite the Supreme Court ordering the government to ensure ration cards for all migrants, lakhs still remain without the essential documentation, mainly because ration cards are given out on the basis of the 2011 census. While the population has increased over the past decade, the number of ration cards hasn’t. When Bhardwaj filed an RTI on what the government was doing about the SC order, she found the authorities were not planning to follow the order till the next census was (the 2021 census was delayed by the pandemic). Until then, the lives of these undocumented migrants will remain in limbo.
Most states have also failed to provide community kitchens as was mandated by the SC during the pandemic. The ones that did catered only to urban populations. In Jharkhand, for instance, the state-run ‘Dal Bhat’ kendras are functional, but only in big cities like Ranchi.
The pandemic, says Bhardwaj, did create a lot of additional problems, but food security itself has been a potent issue plaguing billions in India for decades. The government’s poor performance in ensuring food for all during the pandemic lockdown highlighted the lack of will among political leaders in solving India’s food crisis.
(This appeared in the print edition as "No Prayer for the Malnourished")
