Betul, Madhya Pradesh:
When hunger stalks, several stories of desperation are born.
In Madhya Pradesh, Rajesh Gond, a tribal man, was arrested for stealing wheat from his neighbour's house so that he could feed his family.
Rajesh stole a seventy-kilo sack of wheat worth one thousand rupees from his neighbour's house. For a tribal villager like him whose entire family runs on daily wages , the money and the food, both were beyond his means.
The family was going without food for days together.
''There was nothing to eat. I stole in desperation,'' says Rajesh Gond, a daily wage labourer.
While this stands as the hunger situation in India, the food storage system in the country is a pity. Tonnes of food grains rot outside many government godowns.
Just 70 kilometres away from Rajesh Gond's house in Betul is the Food Corporation of India warehouse. Flaunting the bumper wheat crop of the season, three lakh metric tonnes are left out in the open due to lack of storage space.
This is the amount of food grain that could have fed over 6 lakh Below Poverty Line families for almost a year. And not to forget, Madhya Pradesh is the state that has maximum numbers of children suffering from malnutrition.
Seven out of every hundred children die of food-scarcity related diseases in the state even before they turn one.
However, the government seems to be ignorant of the stark reality.
Paras Jain, Minister for Food & Civil Supplies, Madhya Pradesh says, ''Food grains are not rotting where in the state. And that man should not have stolen food. If he asked for help, the community would have come forward.''
But in this fight between ideologies and needs, it is difficult to say whose crime is bigger, Rajesh's who steals food to fight hunger or the government's that simply lets food go down the drain?