When food relief dehumanizes the poor and vulnerable

Maya Terangpi had two jobs before the coronavirus-induced lockdown in India. She was a daily wage worker by day and a weaver by night in the north-eastern state of Assam. The single mother barely managed to buy food for her daughter and herself. But she took heart that her intricate weaves were popular with the buyers.

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic that swiftly ravaged nations across the globe, including India, the sudden lockdown caught Maya flat-footed. The sight of closed shops and people waiting in long queues for emergency food assistance consisting of five kilograms of rice confirmed that something was amiss. Soon she could not even sell her weaves before she realized that even her town, Karbi Anglong district—“a land of opportunity”—could be out of work.

After the meager rice ran out, Maya foraged for food. She was overjoyed to find a patch of wild taro (henru-arvo), which saved her from the horror of serving plain rice curry to her daughter. Henru-arvo had been her refuge since then during the lockdown.

But as the months in lockdown rolled by without any sign of work, Maya began to lose hope. She was also worried that she would soon have to seek support from her parents in order to feed her daughter.

The most vulnerable as abstract entities

Maya and the majority of women in Assam belong to the so-called vulnerable population, a group which by Indian state definition lives a life without desires or aspirations, especially for providing nutritious foods for their children.

The state imagines that its vulnerable citizens could survive with just a few kilos of rice. This conceptualization is reflected in the state’s COVID-19 special food relief packages announced in April, in which five kilograms of rice would be given every month for the duration of the lockdown to those who did not have a ration card.

Under the National Food Security Act, every Indian citizen above the age of 18 is eligible to have a ration card, which can be used to buy food grains at subsidized rates from fair price shops. But only 59% of the population has access to these ration cards, primarily due to the bureaucratic and politically motivated nature of policy implementation in India.

In his seminal work Seeing Like a State, anthropologist James Scott points out that the state rules by reducing its citizens to abstract entities. These abstracted citizens “would need so many square feet of housing space, acres of farmland, liters of clean water, and units of transportation and so much food.” This implies that citizens should have no idea of tastes and bodily needs. They are characterized as having only those traits that the state deems relevant to its large-scale planning exercise. Such attempts at bracketing people result in needless dehumanization.

A different reality

However, responses from our study led by Women’s Leadership and Training Centre (WLTC) of Assam on women, primarily within the unorganized labor sector in Assam, yielded a different picture. The idea for the survey was based on our observations from the COVID-19 relief work that was undertaken in response to the growing food scarcity. It highlighted that women, particularly those associated with the unorganized sector, were hardest hit.

We interviewed over 200 women who were working as unorganized labor in different unorganized sectors, such as poultry, animal husbandry, and weaving.

Surely, these women lead a precarious life because they lack security and stability. However, precarity for these women does not translate into a lack of desire. On the contrary, their lives revolve around a desire—an unwritten promise—to provide their children with a variety of foods. And they, just like Maya, are striving hard to keep this promise.

The state cannot distribute food rations consisting of some amount of rice and claim to have provided food security for the vulnerable. At a more conceptual level, there is a schism between how the state defines vulnerable citizens through dehumanization and how people deal with their abject poverty by leveraging agency and resilience.

This is well illustrated by these women’s relentless efforts to feed their children well in spite of their precarious condition. But due to the lockdown, they were unable to ensure food variety for their children.

Even before the lockdown, the women struggled to meet their children’s food needs notwithstanding their employment in the unorganized sector. The absence of strong legislation (like flexible contracts and work hours) makes women’s jobs highly insecure and low paid.

Their struggles increased manifold during the coronavirus pandemic. Our study shows that during the lockdown, 68 out of 100 women had no compensation whatsoever. Thus they relied on foraging—from their neighbors’ kitchen gardens, the roadsides, or collectively going to the wild—to feed their children.

In terms of specific occupations, no income/payment was generated in the “household enterprise” (like weaving and cattle rearing). This is worrying because as many as 70 out of 100 women reported working in “household enterprise.”

The determined efforts of Maya and other women to provide food variety to their children negate the state’s idea of their precarity that dehumanizes them. For the government, all these women and their families need in terms of food is five kilos of rice.

The state wants to project a linear narrative of the vulnerable population by ignoring their needs. The women in our survey said that the state needs to be held accountable for food security.

Solidarity amid precarity

To survive and fulfill their promise to their children, the women in our study focused on mutual support. They foraged for food together and even shared recipes. Without the support of other women, within the family and elsewhere, it would have been impossible for them to provide food for their children.

Despite limitations, these acts of solidarity enable women to feel resilient and empower them to keep their promises to their children amid the state’s misguided notion about the food needs and desires of poor and vulnerable citizens.

It has already been widely researched that most definitive forms of such solidarities emerge around food. These acts tell a lot about the structure of the society, as people would share their food only with those with whom they share a sense of fellow feeling.

Economist Jean Drèze argues that for policies to be successful on the ground, the state must listen more to its citizens. This is much in line with what Scott propounded years ago that the only way toward successful governance and reducing dehumanization is to develop the spirit of mutuality. Mutuality will allow taking into cognizance the views of the common citizens. ●

Sampurna Das is a doctoral candidate at the department of sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.