Rita Majhi hasn't tasted any meat or fish for two years. It has been over a year since Puran Baswar bought milk for his children. Bet Ram wonders whether he will get work to pay for his next meal. Majhi, Baswar, Ram are among the millions of Indians whom the economic growth story has left behind as they struggle to make ends meet on meagre incomes which shrink even further with inflation at above 9 per cent for nearly a year.
By the World Bank's latest count, 400 million Indians - about a third of the population - live on less than 1.25 dollars a day. Economist Utsa Patnaik wrote in the Hindu newspaper that more realistic calculations would demonstrate that two-thirds of Indians are poor and under-nourished. "Per head energy and protein intake has been falling for the last two decades as the majority of the population is unable to afford enough food," Patnaik said.
"Calorie consumption has been declining, and the poor are consuming calories way below the recommended norm," India's Planning Commission said in its Human Development Report 2011.
Human development indicators seem to bear this out. The infant mortality rate - number of deaths below the age of 1 per 1,000 live births - was 50 in 2009 and the prevalence of underweight children is among the highest in the world, according to the World Bank. Baswar, 39, who migrated to New Delhi from the western state of Rajasthan, says he has been unable to provide his five children back in the village with a daily cup of milk for over a year.
"We cannot even give them biscuits with their morning tea." His children aged between 4 and 14 have two meagre meals a day. "It's rotis (Indian bread) and a chutney in the morning, and rotis and the cheapest vegetable available in the evening," he said.
That's more or less what Baswar eats before work as an office errand boy and cleaner in the capital's diplomatic enclave. Inflation has hit India's poor the hardest. "My wages have increased by about 40 per cent over these years but the prices of everything, the rent of my one room in a slum, cooking fuel, rice, wheat, dal (pulses) has more than doubled," Majhi said.
Majhi, 45, left her village in the eastern state of West Bengal five years ago to clean New Delhi homes. It is a daily struggle for thousands like them in the capital as they try to save enough of their monthly salaries of about 5,000 rupees (114 dollars) to send home to feed their families.
Majhi and Baswar are near the bottom of the ladder but they are better off than Bet Ram.
Ram has worked as manual labourer at building sites in New Delhi suburb Gurgaon since July. He earns around 150 rupees a day, when there is work.
After paying for the room he shares with six others in local slum, Ram has no savings. He manages with one meal of onions and rotis a day.
Ram said the situation in his village in Bihar's Araria district is worse. "There is no work," he says.
Majhi and Baswar's employers live in a different world. Part of India's well-heeled upper middle-class, they earn between 50,000 and 400,000 rupees a month and can easily spend the equivalent of Baswar's salary on a single meal out.
A recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report said inequality has grown in India over the past 20 years as the overall economy has expanded.
The top 10 per cent of wage-earners make 12 times more than the bottom 10 per cent, compared to six times 20 years ago, the report says.
The federal government on Thursday put before parliament a bill to guarantee subsidised grains to about 75 per cent of rural households and 50 per cent of urban households.
The poor already get subsidised grains, but a Finance Ministry survey for 2010-11 indicated that more than 40 per cent of the food meant for such distribution did not reach its intended recipients.
Doubts have been raised over the new subsidies as they would be distributed through the same network and would require greater procurement. It also has huge financial implications for a government which already runs a budget deep in deficit.
Baswar says his family manages to get a few litres of kerosene each month from the local public distribution outlet in his village, but no rice, wheat or sugar. "We have to buy it from the market," Baswar said.
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