Today the fascist philosophy of RSS-BJP poses the biggest challenge before India and her people. Fascism knows how to hoodwink the people by hiding their real face. The history of fascism is full of false promises that they placed for the people in order to capture political power. Once they got it, all the promises were thrown to the winds.
‘Sab ka vikas’ was the watchword of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his journey to political power. But hunger and poverty, tears and sorrows of the poor are not at all taken into consideration during his governance. The pandemic days revealed the bitter reality hidden in the ‘Sab ka vikas’ programme. Hunger and sorrow that engulfed the poor man’s India is beyond imagination.
Even before the pandemic, malnutrition and child deaths were haunting the country. According to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report, which is said to be the most authentic evaluation of hunger and food insecurity in the world, food insecurity increased by 3.8 percent in India between 2014 and 2019. By 2019, 6.2 crore more people were living with food insecurity than those in 2014. The number of food insecure people galloped from 42.65 crore in 2014-16 to 48.86 crore in 2017-19.
Also, India accounted for 22 per cent of the global burden of food insecurity, the highest for any country in 2017-19, said The Hindu dated August 24, 2020.
As per the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) report of 2015-16, 50.4 percent of pregnant women were anaemic, 8.8 lakh children under five years died in 2018 in our country (The State of the World’s Children report-2019, UNICEF). This report pointed out that malnutrition is the cause of 69 per cent under five deaths.
The Global Hunger Index 2021 talked about an India that lowered its position to 101 among 116 countries, from its 94th position in 2020. We are placed lower than Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. The pandemic has only worsened the situation. It made the lives more miserable for the under-privileged.