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| Sunday, July 5, 2009 |
| Right to food |
Why cant the government provide food to everyone?
Like right to free speech, right to information why cant the government ensure right to food?
Do we really need to goto the moon or build cruise missiles while the majority of our population suffers from malnutrition and hunger?
As per tamil literature, there are three basic necessities for man,
1.Food, 2.Clothes,3,Shelter.
Clothes and shelter comes next to food.
First of all, consider this, why is a government existing?, because people cant manage all their needs,people appoint a government.That government gets its pay in the form of tax and takes care of the necessities of the people.
Food is the #1 necessity for majority of Indian population.
Our society is not an equal one in terms of wealth.But, everyone contributes to it.
Slum dwellers and daily wagers also contribute to the society.
There are several problems in implementation of the "right to food".
But, we have to find ways to implement it.
It seems our current government is moving towards implementing this.
From a Hindu article,
In a nation where mammoth wealth and intense destitution have co-existed for millennia, a law that would bind governments to guarantee that no man, woman or child sleeps hungry could be momentous.
They are forced to cut back on their food intakes, sometimes reduced to eating one meal a day; or to beg for food; or to eat tubers, grasses and mango kernels that fill their stomachs but provide no nutrition; or sometimes just to drink the starch water left over after cooking rice, which their neighbours give them in tight-fisted charity. They suffer to see their children painfully sleep on empty stomachs, and often succumb to ordinary illnesses which better nourished people would easily survive.
Half the children born in this land continue to be malnourished, and two out of three women are anaemic, because even within families, women eat the least and only after all others have been fed.
the Chairperson of the UPA, Sonia Gandhi, seized the initiative by writing her first letter to the Prime Minister since the installation of this government, proposing a bill that much more comprehensively guarantees adequate food to people who live with hunger. Many people who are chronically denied food have been specifically detailed in the draft she recommended: such as single women, disabled and aged people, street children, bonded workers, people in casual, low paid employment including agricultural labour and rag-picking, the urban homeless, and others.
The President of the Republic of Brazil, when his country launched a similar food guarantee, called "Hunger Zero". He had pledged,
"We will make it possible for people in our country to eat three square meals a day, every day, with no need for handouts from anyone. Brazil cannot go on living with so much inequity. We must overcome hunger, extreme poverty and social exclusion. Our war is not to kill anyone. It is to save lives".
A bonded worker, a child searching in rubbish heaps, and a disabled or aged man who stretches out his limbs for alms, possibly may have a full stomach, but without the dignity that every single human being is entitled to.
Some possible ways to implement "right to food" are mentioned here.Labels: awareness, india, indians, people |
posted by bharath @ 9:30 AM   |
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