Truth vs Hype: In Uttar Pradesh, Drought, Hunger, Denial

This week we traveled to Bundelkhand, one of the 50 districts in Uttar Pradesh where drought has been officially declared, and where repeated crop failures has pushed people to the brink of hunger. The most dramatic example of this was the revival of long-abandoned habits of eating rotis made of grass. But when our story aired, the Uttar Pradesh government attempted a rather clumsy cover-up, trying to 'sanitise' the village on which we had based our report. This ignores the reality we discovered, of a collapse of government safety nets meant to protect the rural poor, not just in one village, but across an entire region.