Two very different stories that I chanced upon today. Both have to do with food. And both have to do with death. Both have to do with abject Government callousness, and the complete disregard for regulatory norms by those who control the area.
The first is a link that i followed from the Milli Gazette on deaths due to starvation in Murshidabad, in West Bengal. The West Bengal Government website describes the area as:

The place of the Nawabs. Natural tradition of culture and education are still felt in the district. Agriculture is the main activity. Sericulture and mango are the two cash crops in addition. Murshidabad silk is a name by itself, which adds to the income of the district to a great extent.

It is in this very same Murshidabad – in a non descript place called Jalnagi – that people are dying of hunger. How is it possible in a nation which has an agricultural surplus, you may ask? And rightly so. The Milli Gazette reports:

near-starvation conditions in Jalangi have been caused by the changing course of the river Padma, which has destroyed farmlands, leading to numerous deaths and rendering hundreds of people to destitution, forcing them to beg or else to migrate outside the region in search of survival opportunities. Stark poverty has reduced many people to surviving on roots and leaves, leading to widespread disease and malnutrition. To make matters worse, apathetic local and state administrations are allowing food supplies to rot in godowns while a majority of the affected people are not even issued below-poverty-line ration cards. Poverty eradication programmes are not being properly implemented and people working under the Food For Work programme remain unpaid for long periods despite funds having been released to the local authorities. People complain that money is being deducted from the paltry wages that they are entitled to under the poverty eradication programmes in order to fund local CPI (M) party activities . It is also alleged that beneficiaries of these programmes are selected on the basis of party affiliation.

You can read the full report here.

Maybe the Left Front should stop screaming about disinvestment and focus on how Government Schemes (and there are a lot of ‘good’ schemes that the Government has) can be effectively utilised to help the poor.

The Central Government needs to come down heavily on any state government that links welfare schemes to party affiliation, support or membership. If we can feel outraged about Tsunami aid – provided by American missionaries – being linked to religion, we should feel doubly outraged by our own elected representatives behaving like a bunch of blackmailing thugs.

The second story is from another part of India, equally fertile as Bengal. The bread basket to the nation. Punjab. CSE – the organisation that blew the whistle on Coke and Pepsi being contaminated with pesticides – reports that farmers in Punjab have 15 to 605 times the acceptable amounts of pesticide in their blood. And, no one knows what kind of long term effects this contamination will have. CSE’s press release says :

The levels of certain persistent organochlorine pesticides (OCs) in the samples were astounding: 15-605 times higher than those found in blood samples of people in the US, tested by the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in its report of 2003. Levels of lindane, a restricted pesticide in India, were 605 times higher than those found in the US population. Similarly, the levels of DDT were 188 times higher. The CSE study detected hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) in all the blood samples, and DDT in 95 per cent of the samples

The full report is here.
Is life so cheap in our country that at one end we let people die of hunger – while food rots in warehouses, and at the other end – people growing food using “productivity enhancers” end up dying of slow poisoning.

Neither story is probably going to be picked up by mainstream media. Afterall, who is interested in a bunch of poor people dying?