Summary:
Kolkata, Jul 1 (PTI) At least one in every five households in West Bengal faced “some food crisis” during the lockdown period in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the situation could have been worse had the state government not come up with free distribution of food grains through an augmented PDS mechanism, according to a report released by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen-led Pratichi (India) Trust.
The study, "Staying Alive –COVID 19 and Public services in West Bengal", said that the reporting of food crisis by households belonging to the Scheduled Tribes (ST) community of the state was “higher” as compared to other social groups.
"According to the findings of this study, one out of five households faced some food crisis.
The duration of the crisis varied between 4 and 240 days.
A majority of these households suffered for about 60 days," the report said.
It appeared that reporting of such cases from rural areas was “marginally higher” than that in urban localities.
This was largely due to the fact that sources of income in urban areas were more stable.
A higher proportion of urban households had income from salary and pensions, the report said.
While reflecting on the social groups that bore the brunt of the lockdown, the survey claimed that the reporting of food crisis by households belonging to the ST community was "higher".
"When social groups are taken into account, reporting of food crisis by Scheduled Tribes was higher than that by any other social group.
Association with underdeveloped agriculture, petty non-agricultural activities and migration seemed to have played a role in this regard.
In the so-called normal times, poor income from cultivation could have been supplemented by non-agricultural activities and seasonal migration; but both these avenues got restricted during the lockdown period," the report claimed.
Of the households that reported some food shortages, the most (29 per cent) were those whose primary source of income was hiring out labour for agricultural activities, followed by those who eked out a living from non-agricultural works (25 per cent), the report said.
The primary data for the study was collected over the phone during the period between July and December in 2020, and with some pauses, in the first few months of 2021.