MUMBAI, India — In India, even the gods are doing without.
Food inflation that has been stuck in the double digits for a year has had a deep impact on school lunches, family meals and holy offerings. Anger with high prices erupted into protests this week that disrupted flights, trains and traffic.
While policymakers debate how to feed people without driving the country deeper in debt, Indians grapple with the sad arithmetic of how to do more with less.
Fruit is becoming a luxury. People have cut back on protein. Vegetable sellers complain profits are down because people are buying less.
Officially, food inflation neared 22 percent in December, a 17-year high. By March, it had eased to 16.7 percent, with the cost of wheat 14 percent higher than a year ago and pulses like the lentils known as dal — a crucial source of protein in a nation full of vegetarians — up 31 percent.
It is too early to say whether sustained high food prices will aggravate malnutrition, but advocates worry escalating costs are eroding the diets of millions in a country where one in two children was malnourished before the price spike.
“There are large numbers of people who even in good times don’t have sufficient food intake,” said Harsh Mander, who was appointed by India’s Supreme Court to monitor hunger countrywide. He estimates that 80 million to 200 million Indians go to sleep hungry each night.
Mander is campaigning for a right-to-food law being debated within the ruling Congress Party. Existing food subsidies have cushioned the poorest of the poor, but they aren’t pegged to inflation and, plagued by corruption, don’t always work.
Deepa Sinha, a researcher who works with Mander, said the free rice and 2 rupee ($0.05) per-student subsidy that public schools rely on to make hot lunches goes a lot less far these days.
“The dal quantity has come down drastically,” she said. “It’s mainly plain rice with a little bit of dal you can’t see. There’s no vegetables now.”
