It’s not every day that you would associate the words ‘food diary’ with children and young people living on the streets.  After all to maintain one they would need food to begin with. Child Rights and You (CRY) volunteers, in their many years of working with children in situations of poverty, realised that the general public don’t really understand what hunger means for children. So volunteers met with children from various backgrounds like those living on the street, young people involved in begging, tribal children and those commonly termed vagrants, to understand more about hunger in measurable terms, through a measurement of the calories they ingest on a daily basis. 

Chronically hungry

Two-and-half-year-old Surjo Basfore lives with his five-year-old sister on Platform No 4 of the Kalyani Railway Station in Kolkata. Their combined earnings -- about Rs 20 to 25 a day -- are handed over to their father, who also begs for a living. Breakfast is about half a puri, which brother and sister share. Lunch is about two handfuls of dal and rice. They usually don’t get an evening snack. Dinner is about two more handfuls of dal and rice or one chapati. Doing the math is easy. The total calorie intake for both children put together is about 1,000 calories. Surviving usually on food thrown away by railway passengers, they face chronic starvation.  
They are too young to understand irony. But both children live within shouting distance of Kalyani’s Food Corporation of India (FCI) godowns which have store about 11,000 metric tonnes of foodgrains.

More than eating

A few years ago the Supreme Court said that foodgrain left to rot in India should be distributed to the poor. Children like six-year-old Vishal will never know. He starts his day with half-a-cup of tea and two biscuits bought by his mother from a pavement stall. Breakfast is one samosa-pav. Lunch is khichdi from a local charity, half of which he saves to eat in the late-afternoon. By night he’s really hungry again, which is when a small packet of fries is bought for Rs 5 – the only amount his mother can spare. Vishal’s recommended dietary intake should be about 1,715 calories. He barely makes 800. Food might be scarce but Vishal’s address is a posh one. He stays in the backyard slums of Mumbai’s Khar area known for its schools, shopping malls, hospitals and steep residential property prices. All it lacks is an anganwadi, which would have gone a long way to keep children like him fed.

Tribal and neglected

Six-year-old Dharma Pahariya and Sani Paharin, from the Godda district of Jharkhand, called the Santhal Pargana, have been eating only rice and salt twice a day. Their total calorie intake is a meagre 440 calories or about one-fourth of the 1,715 calories they should be eating.

Hailing from the Pahariya tribal community they live in a parched forest that has not seen enough rain in the last few years. Food is scarce. Malaria and Kala-Azar are still dreaded threats, as they were 200 years ago. Earlier this year, media reports on the spurt of Kala-Azar cases in tribal-dominated Boyarizore and Sundar Paharia blocks in the district, prompted the Godda health department to push the panic button. But little has improved.

Food is so much more than just filling stomachs. Both doctors and people who work with children state that nourishment gaps at this age will result in lifelong poor health. Such severely malnourished children will not have age-appropriate levels of development in terms of height, weight and cognitive development. 

For such children the options are rather limited. A local nutrition rehabilitation centre (NRC) in Majhgaon, near Satna in Madhya Pradesh, a Government of India programme, runs a 15-day ‘course’ to bring near-death cases of malnourishment back from the brink of death with a two-week injection of essential food. The centre admits and gives food to only infants, and not to older children or parents, making the entire effort rather pointless, given that usually entire settlements are dying of hunger. Media reports say that 10 children have succumbed to hunger over the last year in this area.

“The condition here is so bad that the food distributed by the neighbourhood anganwadi is brought back home by the children and shared with the entire family,” says Sasmita Jena from CRY. “And since the infants are small they are the last priority and are only breastfed by the mother.”

It wasn’t easy for the volunteers working on the project to gather the data. Satyajit, the volunteer from Kolkata, who documented Surja’s food diary, says, “Extreme poverty, poor health and malnourishment made Surja’s parents reluctant to participate in the project.”

There was a time when Oliver asked for more and changed the way literature viewed orphans forever. Hunger stalks every child who is poor, whether from tribal areas or urban pockets of poverty. India’s children in poverty might not all be orphans but they certainly need more, especially in terms of nourishment.  After all. stable economic growth can’t be sustained on a future that’s so hungry today.

(Paromita Pain is a senior reporter and sub-editor with The Hindu and its feature supplements Young World and NXg) 

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Who is Johnny Appleseed?

Johnny AppleseedThe other day I was reading about retired people in a Mumbai suburb who protect their local trees from being cut. This led me to thinking about ordinary environmental heroes. People who are not doing some amazing scientific or technological feat, but merely looking after the environment in simple ways, making small differences that add up.

I was also reminded of a famous American character called Johnny Appleseed. Though he was a very real person, Appleseed has become something of an environmental myth and his life is a wonderful and inspirational story.

As soon as you say the name Johnny Appleseed, most Americans will picture a man wearing a pot on his head and ill-fitting second-hand clothes, walking barefoot and scattering seeds. To compress his life into a couple of sentences, Johnny Appleseed walked all over the central United States planting apples in wild and rough places wherever he went, so that other people could benefit from these trees. He lived simply, had very few possessions, and dedicated his life to helping people and looking after his trees.

The importance of these trees becomes apparent when you realise that this was done not just before the advent of supermarkets, but at a time when immigrant settlers were moving away from the cities to faraway rural areas. These settlers were trying to live off the land, farm, set up townships and survive in the wilderness while trying to do so.

Johnny Appleseed’s real name was John Chapman and he was born on September 1774. He received a good education and when he was 25, started working in a plant nursery. These nurseries were not for ornamental or home plants but plants that were needed for agriculture or used to start orchards.

Chapman began specialising in apple trees, which he planted all around the west coast states. There are claims that some of the apple orchards found today in the modern-day states of New York and Pennsylvania came from trees originally planted by him.

During his lifetime many of the states that make up the present-day United States of America were not yet created. The whole north central belt around the Great Lakes was not settled (this is the region that later became the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois). In the early 1800s, Chapman was among the first to explore this area before other settlers moved in.

Chapman had a simple working style: he would go into unexplored areas alone carrying a big bag of apple seeds until he found a good place to plant them. Then he would clear the land, get rid of the weeds and plant his apple seeds. He built fences to protect the trees from animals. Although these orchards varied in size and depended on the terrain, some were pretty large and covered acres.

For 50 years, Chapman wandered around planting his trees. When the settlers arrived they would find the young apple trees already there for them to use. Chapman did actually sell his seeds to people who wanted them, but many were planted just for the benefit of whoever needed them.

Though Chapman started off as a businessman trying to earn a living, his lifestyle soon changed as he lived his simple yet tough life in the wilderness. He did all his planting work himself. He always carried his apple seeds on his back. He lived alone for weeks at a time, with only the Native Americans and wild animals for company. Unusually for those times, he was quite friendly with the Native Americans who accepted him. He never carried a gun and did not eat meat. He walked barefoot most of the time. Rumours started springing up that he even spoke to animals! There’s one story that Chapman was once stuck in a snowstorm far away from any house or road. He crept into a hollow fallen tree for shelter and found it already occupied by a hibernating bear and her cubs, who allowed him to spend the night with them!

Chapman sold his trees for very little money; he often traded them for food or second-hand clothes. He started becoming famous as more and more settlers moved into the wilderness. In later life he stayed with them as a guest, but he never stopped looking after his trees. Nor did he alter his simple lifestyle. By now almost everyone knew him as Johnny Appleseed; very few people even knew what his real name was.

And the picture of the man wearing a pot on his head? That’s how he is shown in most early illustrations of him. The explanation given is that Chapman always carried a single kettle-like pot with him while he travelled. This was easily carried on his head, leaving his hands free to plant trees.

Chapman died in 1845 after catching an infection from walking too long in the cold to repair a fence protecting one of his orchards.

I used to wonder why Chapman planted apples when there were possibly more useful plants around. But then I learnt that in those times apples were not just luxury fruits. Apples were an important part of the settlers’ diet; they were preserved to eat during winter when nothing else was available. Apples were cooked, pressed and the juice made into cider and vinegar. Livestock too was fed apples and apple leaves. And the wood used as firewood and to make furniture.

Do we have any environmental heroes like Johnny Appleseed in India? Write in and let me know.

-- Manoj Nadkarni

InfoChange News & Features, May 2006