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Expert Interview Series: Mr V R Raman on Food Insecurity in India
August 18, 2022 @ 10:00 am - 11:30 am
In the 5th episode of our “Expert Interview Series”, Dr Jasmine Fledderjohann, Principal Investigator on the Food Security for Equitable Futures project, speaks to Mr V R Raman, an expert on various social development systems and policies, especially in relation to the Indian subcontinent. He completed his post-graduate studies in Public Health at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa and his graduate studies in English language and literature at the University of Calicut, Kerala, India. Over the last three decades, Mr. Raman has worked closely with most of the state-led flagship social development missions in India, such as the National Literacy Mission, National Health Mission, Swachh Bharat (Sanitation) Mission, Jal Jeevan (Drinking Water) Mission and Poshan Abhiyan (Nutrition Mission). In addition, he is a co-founder and leader of some of the noted and mass-scale community health and nutrition programs and a few important state-civil society partnership organisations. Through his work, Mr Raman has explored gender, physical and social vulnerabilities and how they can be alleviated to build a human rights and dignity-based equitable society. He is currently the National Convenor of the Public Health Resource Network in India and is associated with several organisations and people’s campaigns.
In this interview, Mr. Raman identifies the various interconnected dimensions of food insecurity in India. Dr. Jasmine Fledderjohann and Mr Raman discuss the following issues that have a direct bearing on food insecurity in India:
• The links between water and sanitation with food insecurity and malnourishment,
• The structural challenges farmers are facing,
• The inadequacy and problems of market-based solutions in addressing the structural challenges of hunger and food insecurity,
• The challenges of inflation and price hikes and their impact on the lives of the masses,
• How much state-led schemes are able to address food insecurity,
• The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on food security,
• The need to move away from a market-centric economic model to a people-centric economy and,
• The need to refine data collection and monitoring practices to generate research geared toward identifying and alleviating food insecurity.
