MADHUBANI, India, 12 August 2007 — Senior bureaucrat Nibha Thakur ran short of cash as she shopped for vegetables in India’s eastern Bihar state, where severe floods have pushed basic food prices beyond the reach of millions. “Survival is now a major issue,” said Thakur, lugging a bagful of potatoes she had just purchased at four times their cost last month.
“We may just have to do with boiled rice in the coming days as everything else is getting out of the reach of even the middle class,” said the civil servant in hard-hit Madhubani district.
Here, 1.6 million flood victims are surviving on state food handouts, but many complain they are far from enough.
Nearly 14 million people have been affected by the worst floods in 30 years in Bihar — and at a time when crops were ripening in the fields.
Prices of various food items in Bihar, already one of India’s poorest regions, have on average shot up around threefold as the shortages worsen.
Residents of Madhubani district are suffering more than many others because unlike the rest of Bihar, food crops are not grown in this area.
The monsoon has left 2.2 million people homeless in Madhubani. Most are now squatting in roadside shelters.
“We don’t grow anything here,” district administrator Rahul Singh told AFP as hundreds of flood survivors picketed his fortified bungalow, begging for food.
“Prices of vegetables are spiraling in Madhubani but we can’t do much as the floods have breached highways,” he said. “The shortages are beginning to tell.” He said he had overseen the establishment of state-run food shops to counter profiteers. According to the Indian government, at least 1.1 million hectares (2.7 million acres) of farmland and 6,500 villages were submerged in Bihar.
The state normally produces 7.7 million tons of vegetables a year on 4.98 million hectares of land.
State agriculture experts are still working to tally the losses in 18 of the 19 districts where food crops are grown.
“We foresee a 90 percent loss in vegetable growth which will have a grim impact on per capita nutritional intake,” warned B.C. Chowdhury, chief researcher in Bihar’s Agriculture University in Samastipur district.
“In very simple words, millions will go hungry if this crisis is not averted very, very quickly,” warned prominent doctor A.K. Jha in the state capital Patna.
Bihar was ranked India’s No. 1 producer of okra, or lady’s finger, which now costs three times the six rupees (14 cents) a kilo (2.2 pounds) it fetched before the floods began in late July.
The state was also one of India’s leading producers of cauliflower, potatoes and tomatoes but now the prices of those vegetables have also tripled, according to traders’ associations.
“Prices of rice, wheat, pulses and oils too have gone up but not as much as the vegetables, mutton and poultry products,” said Rajiv Pandey, a wholesaler in the state’s worst-hit district of Darbhanga.
Chowdhury warned the worst was yet to come in this state of 120 million people.
“Maize is the most critical item in Bihar which is sown around October and this winter crop could fail if flood waters do not drain out in time,” the scientist warned.
Meanwhile, at least 30 people were injured when they clashed with police demanding food and clothes, witnesses and officials said in Patna yesterday.
Police used batons to disperse villagers fighting for food and relief material late on Friday in Begusarai and Nalanda districts of impoverished Bihar, vast swathes of which have been inundated by the annual monsoon rains.
Hungry flood victims protested yesterday against the police action, forcing authorities to transfer some relief officials. “I have removed the concerned administrative officer for his uncalled for action on flood victims seeking relief,” said Begusarai’s top administrator, Sanjeev Hans. Villagers from the area said there was no electricity as flood waters swamped a power station.
“We have increased supply of food and relief to reach the last stranded man,” Satish Chandra Jha, a senior official, said.
At least 61 new deaths by drowning have been reported from Bihar since Thursday evening, raising the death toll in the South Asian flood to nearly 700 in the past few weeks.
