"I cannot prohibit people from eating certain
types of food. There are many people in the world
who take mango kernels."
Orissa Special Relief Commissioner Hrishikesh Panda

IT was just a few days after we were all subjected to the horrific images on television of -- no, not people dying in Orissa but more hideous -- our politicians quibbling whether the deaths in Kashipur were by starvation or not.

I was then visiting the veteran photographer T S Satyan. As I looked through his awesome work, one particular photograph stuck in my mind.

It showed a small, painfully thin young girl sitting on a handcart, her eyes as empty and hopeless as the cart, the bones of her little body like the rickety bamboo it was made of.

It had a stark caption, 'Drought in Kalahandi'. It also had the date the picture was taken. The year seared itself in my mind....

The days that followed produced a lot more disheartening news. There were many dead; pathetic, cloth-covered mounds that could well have been bundles of sticks if not for the fact that two feet stuck out.

And weeping for them, with stones in their eyes instead of tears, were the dying. Emaciated sticklike creatures in rags, barely recognizable as human beings till the camera closed in and you saw the faces. Their eyes matched that of the little girl in Satyan's photograph.

Once more, I was haunted by the year.

1977.

That was 24 years ago. That meant what we are reacting with shock and horror today had been happening for nearly a quarter century!

It was too horrible to comprehend. Wasn't 24 years long enough to learn, to fill the eyes of those children with the promise of food, of tomorrow?

I called up Satyan to ask about the photograph. He said he had clicked it for a UNICEF team. They had gone to Kalahandi to record the plight of the people, especially the children, during -- yes, you guessed right -- a time of drought.

Along with the picture that interested me, Satyan remembered clicking one more -- of a 14-year-old girl, victim of the hunger that the drought brought, huddled in front of her hut, too weak to cover her exposed genitals. Next to her, a lamp flickered. Just as he clicked the photograph, the lamp went off. A few days later, as he was leaving the area, he was told the girl had died.

The death toll in Kashipur had now climbed to 24 despite the 150 tonnes of food grains in Kashipur's own godown, forget the 60 million tonnes rotting elsewhere. And as footage of more shrivelled creatures appeared on television, I searched for more information on these aliases of death and deprivation.

Bolangir, Nuapada, Baragarh, Kalahandi. The names were like some hideous death chant. And yet, they could have meant something very different.

Kashipur is just north of Koraput district where there is a place called Jeypore. Just another meaningless name on the map, you would say, except that this tract of land has been identified as one of the centres where the domestication of rice began as early as 3000 BC.

It was from here, centuries ago, that rice started moving to places within and outside India. Analysis of the grain from Jeypore tract indicates that it has played a significant role in the evolution of different varieties of rice.

That is not all. As recently as the early 60s, Orissa's share of the total rice cultivated in the country was 11 per cent; and its productivity 92.5 per cent of the national average.

Today, even though this has fallen to around 60 per cent of the national average, Orissa still produces more rice per head (163kgs) annually than Uttar Pradesh (92kgs), which is the second largest rice-producing state in the country.

So where has all the rice gone? More importantly, why are all these people starving to death?

Okay, so let us for a moment accept the politician's explanation that many of the people did not starve to death but died of the 'contaminated' mango seeds they chose to eat. And let us blame Mother Nature, who has put this area into a vicious cycle of drought and floods.

But, even then, what has happened to all the aid that is supposed to have been pouring into these areas?

In 1988, then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, shocked by what he saw on his visits to Kalahandi, launched the ambitious Orissa Tribal Development Project. It brought in Rs 320 million in foreign donations -- of which, only 80 million was actually utilised.

Seven years later, the P V Narasimha Rao government announced a Rs 46 billion KBK Long Term Action Plan. It didn't really take off and was relaunched in 1998 by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, as the Revised Long Term Action Plan with a budget of Rs 56 billion.

In the meantime, the British government together with the Orissa state is supposed to have started the Western Orissa Rural Livelihood Project, to bring in Rs 2.29 billion over a 10-year-period.

Where has all this money gone? Wouldn't it have been enough to buy, if not grow, food for the people who are still dying?

The families of the dead were given a blanket, some clothes and three aluminium vessels each. But no food.

It doesn't matter if we have 60 or 600 million tonnes of surplus food in our country. As long as we continue to have calluses on our hearts, as long as we continue to fight over whether it was starvation or mango kernels, people will die.

Bob Dylon put it aptly:

How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind....

Design: Lynette Menezes

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