Living with hunger: chronic food deprivation among aged people, single women, and people with disability

"This paper seeks to illustrate the experience of living with chronic hunger, including prolonged deprivation of sufficient food to lead a health and active life; recurring uncertainty about the availability of food; loss of dignity in securing food for bare subsistence through involuntary resort to foraging and begging, debt bondage and low end highly underpaid work; self denial; and sacrifice of other survival needs like medicine. It attempts to understand these through listening to the experiences as recounted by destitute persons from intensely food insecure social groups themselves – specifically aged people without care givers, single women headed households, and adults with disability – in 8 villages in Orissa, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. It attempts to describe the experiences of living with hunger of these people, as lived, recalled and described by them, and also as interpreted by them.