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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Diamonds

Diwali and the gift-giving season may be over, but soon it will be Christmas. And the advertisements for various gift items will continue into that season.

Among the most noticeable ads are the ones for jewellery. Of these, the ads for diamond jewellery stand out. If they are anything to go by there must be a lot of people buying diamonds as gifts to show their love.

Yet, it’s only in the recent past that the giving of diamonds as gifts has become popular among the middle classes.

Diamonds have always been a sign of prosperity and romance. They’re supposed to be what every woman wants. There are movies, songs and catch phrases about diamonds -- ‘diamonds are a girl’s best friend’, ‘diamonds are forever’ -- all of which emphasise the expense, glamour and desirability of diamonds. Western movies have taught us that if a man proposes marriage to a woman he has to do it with a diamond.

But for all their sparkle and desirability, diamonds have a history of misery behind them. The way they are mined, polished and made into expensive jewellery is not a story about beauty, romance or adventure, but of greed and marketing.

Until around 100 years ago diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil. The total amount of jewellery made from diamonds would have been only a couple of kilograms. They were just one of the many gemstones used in jewellery; no one thought of them as being better or worth more than the others. If you wanted to use a red stone you used a ruby, if a clear or yellow stone, a diamond.

Then, in 1870, diamonds were discovered in South Africa. These mines had so many diamonds they could be mined in tonnes! This dropped the price of diamonds and people who owned the mines started to get worried since the price of diamonds depended only on their scarcity value, not because they were beautiful in themselves, unlike the other gemstones. They were especially worried that if more mines were found, diamonds would become semi-precious stones instead of precious ones.

So the diamond mine-owners all got together and formed a club (or, as it’s known in business, a conglomerate) to control the production of diamonds. Every year, no matter how many diamonds they mined, they would release only a certain quantity to the public at a time, to ensure an artificial scarcity of the gems. The rest were stored. The conglomerate these diamond mine-owners formed was called De Beers, which soon became one of the most powerful companies in the world, controlling nearly all aspects of the diamond industry. At one point, De Beers owned not only all the diamond mines in southern Africa but diamond trading companies all over the world too. Even now, 60% of all diamonds and diamond deals are theirs. De Beers also controlled the smaller companies that cleaned and polished the diamonds, not by owning them outright but by tightly controlling how much they processed and who they sold the polished diamonds to. If these small diamond-processing companies did anything to upset De Beers, they would be given less diamonds, even none, forcing them to toe the company line.

‘Cartel’ is the name given to an organisation made up of producers of any commodity, which is created to stop competition by controlling the production and distribution of that commodity. De Beers became an extremely powerful cartel. So much so that unlike any other commodity, diamond prices have never ever dropped since the opening up of the South African mines.

Diamonds that have been mined, polished and turned into gemstones from their rough state are sold on 24 international diamond exchanges called ‘bourses’. This is also a tightly controlled step in the diamond supply chain; wholesalers and retailers are able to buy relatively small lots of diamonds, which they make into jewellery and sell to the public.

De Beers also took over the marketing of diamonds. This was a great move: not only did they control the supply of diamonds by owning the mines, they also actually created and influenced demand through advertising. With the help of some very good advertising agencies, De Beers created an image for the diamond as something that was rare and expensive and represented wealth, elegance and romance.

In fact, the western ‘tradition’ of giving a diamond ring as an engagement ring did not exist before the De Beers strategy. Women were actively encouraged through ads to view diamonds as a prerequisite to any romantic marriage. Diamonds were placed in movies and given to movie stars to wear at special occasions. The slogan ‘diamonds are forever’ was also designed so that people would not resell their diamonds, seeing them instead as something that symbolises eternal love.

Apart from powerful marketing and the resulting social pressure, one of the biggest problems with diamonds is where they come from. Nearly half of all diamonds originate from central and southern Africa -- countries like South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Tanzania and Sierra Leone. Some of these countries are at war, either with other countries or in a state of civil war, with various violent paramilitary groups fighting each other and controlling certain parts of the country. Many of these armed groups are just criminal gangs that have taken control of the diamond mines, using the proceeds from diamond sales to finance their operations, especially the buying of guns and other weapons. The mines these gangs own are often mined by forced labour.

Diamonds are not like currency or cheques since they cannot be traced. They are also much lighter than gold of the same value, making them extremely easy to smuggle. And people who sell illegal weapons prefer being paid in things that cannot be easily traced. In many cases, if these diamonds were not available the rebel groups would not have been able to buy weapons and, perhaps, there would have been no war!

So in a way, diamonds are responsible for a lot of death and destruction and diamonds sold through this process are known as ‘conflict diamonds’ or ‘blood diamonds’. You cannot really tell by looking at a diamond where it was mined, so it is very difficult not to end up buying ‘blood diamonds’.

After getting a lot of bad publicity, the diamond industry tried to do something about this by starting the Kimberley Process in 2002. The Kimberley Process tries to provide documentation and certification to diamond exports, to ensure that conflict diamonds do not get mixed up with normally-mined diamonds. Sadly, however, the Kimberley Process does not work very well because smuggling diamonds across badly controlled African borders is pretty easy, and, after they are smuggled, fake certificates can easily be attached to them.

-- Manoj Nadkarni

InfoChange News & Features, December 2006

 
 
   
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