BHarwana
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On September 28, Santoshi Kumar, an 11 year old girl in Simdega district of Jharkhand, died because of starving for nearly 8 days. Her family had not received any ration since months as their ration card was cancelled, after being struck off the Public Distribution System (PDS) for not linking their ration card with Aadhar. The system of Aadhar has been under continuous criticism for ‘depriving the most vulnerable people of their grain entitlements’. Since a set of Public Interest Litigations have been pending in the Supreme Court urging it to intervene and stop the government from mandating the compulsory possession of Aadhaar, therefore, without going into the debates around Aadhar, this piece discusses the larger issue of non-implementation of one of the basic rights- the right to food.
Right to Food The right to food is a part of fundamental rights and directives principles of the Indian Constitution. In Chameli Singh v. State of U.P. (1996), a three judge Bench of the Supreme Court had held as follows: “In any organised society, right to live as a human being is not ensured by meeting only the animal needs of man… Right to live guaranteed in any civilised society implies the right to food, water, decent environment education, medical care and shelter. These are basic human rights known to any civilised society.”
The PDS in India is perhaps the largest distribution network of its type in the world. In spite of many programmes and schemes, there have always been concerns regarding food, hunger and malnutrition.
In 2001, after 47 tribals and Dalits were starved to death in south-eastern Rajasthan, despite India’s foodstocks having an excess of around 40 million tonnes of foodgrains that year, activists and organizations had approached the apex court to secure food security for Indians. In one of the initial orders, the Supreme Court in the Right to Food case (People’s Union for Civil Liberties v. Union of India) observed (23 July, 2001):
“In our opinion, what is of utmost importance is to see the aged, infirm, disabled, destitute women, destitute men, who are in danger of starvation, pregnant and lactating women and destitute children, especially in cases where they or members of their family do not have sufficient funds to provide food for them. In case of famine, there may be shortage of food, but here the situation is that amongst plenty there is scarcity. Plenty of food is available, but distribution of the same amongst the very poor and the destitute is scarce and non-existent leading to malnourishment, starvation and other related problems.”
The failure of the respective governments to implement the right to food has often intensified survival crisis of a huge percentage of the population, particularly in drought-affected areas. A public interest litigation filed by Swaraj Abhiyan, in 2016, before the Supreme Court had revealed that nearly 540 million, or 40% of the people in India, are in the grip of a drought.
http://www.livelaw.in/death-starvation-right-food-indian-democracy/
