Hunger and Starvation and deaths due to starvation are still prevailing in many countries, including India. A non-profit Organization called”bhook.com” is creating an awareness of the facts related to hunger and starvation; also the organization is providing an unique online solution to the problem of hunger.
The following are some facts about hunger and starvation as pointed out by the above websie:-
1. Hunger remains the No.1 cause of death in the world, followed by:-
- Aids
- Cancer
- Heart Diseases
- Kidney Diseases
2. There are 820 million chronically hungry people in the world.
3. 1/3rd of the world’s hungry live in India.
4. 836 million Indians survive on less than Rs. 20 (less than half-a-dollar) a day.
5. Over 20 crore Indians will sleep hungry tonight.
6. 10 million people die every year of chronic hunger and hunger-related diseases. Only eight percent are the victims of hunger caused by high-profile earthquakes, floods, droughts and wars.
7. India has 212 million undernourished people – only marginally below the 215 million estimated for 1990–92.
8. 99% of the 1000 Adivasi households from 40 villages in the two states, who comprised the total sample, experienced chronic hunger (unable to get two square meals, or at least one square meal and one poor/partial meal, on even one day in the week prior to the survey). Almost as many (24.1 per cent) had lived in conditions of semi-starvation during the previous month.
9. Over 7000 Indians die of hunger every day.
10. Over 25 lakh Indians die of hunger every year.
11. Despite substantial improvement in health since independence and a growth rate of 8 percent in recent years, under-nutrition remains a silent emergency in India, with almost 50 percent of Indian children underweight and more than 70 percent of the women and children with serious nutritional deficiencies as anemia.
12. The 1998 – 99 Indian survey shows 57 percent of the children aged 0 – 3 years to be either severely or moderately stunted and/or underweight.
13. During 2006 – 2007, malnutrition contributed to seven million Indian children dying, nearly two million before the age of one.
14. 30% of newborn are of low birth weight, 56% of married women are anaemic and 79% of children age 6-35 months are anaemic.
15. The number of hungry people in India is always more than the number of people below official poverty line (while around 37% of rural households were below the poverty line in 1993-94, 80% of households suffered under nutrition).
We can feed the starving people through the website named “bhook.com”, by simply clicking the hungry people will be fed with food.
The following are the details about the website for feeding the hungry children:-
‘Bhookh’ means hunger in Hindi. “Bhookh.com” is a non-profit organization as mentioned earlier. At the website the focus is on chronic, persistent hunger as distinct from other hunger emergencies that make the news but constitute only 8% of all hunger related deaths.
Food Production is not necessarily the reason for hunger and starvation. Almost every location on earth can produce enough food for its population. Even India is self-sufficient in food production. In fact, government warehouses are over- flowing with unbought subsidised food. The challenge is that people cannot earn enough to buy the food that is available or the food gets destroyed before it is bought due to poor storage facilities.
Over population also is not the reason for hunger and starvation. It is simplistic to say that overpopulation causes hunger. Countries like India have grown enormously in the last 50 years, while hunger has decreased. If population were the cause of hunger, then hunger would be a problem for the future, when in fact it was much worse 50 or 100 years ago.
Some would even say that hunger causes overpopulation – in countries where many children die, families have more children to compensate.
In truth, the issues are inextricably inter-linked. Population growth makes it far more difficult to build the schools, health centers and other services needed to have a healthy and productive population. And only when people know their children will live will they stop having so many children.
More than one-third of the world’s hungry people are in India. One-third are in sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the remainder is in “pockets” of hunger in Latin America and the rest of Asia.
Bhookh.com is the India’s first online activism site. It gives Internet users the daily opportunity to quickly make a difference to feed Indians who are dying of hunger. In less than 5 seconds, visitors can click on the “Give Free Food” button and, at no cost to them, send food to the hungry.
Bhookh.com is owned and operated by “Bhookh.com Foundation”.
When we click in the “bhook.com” website:-
1)Our click is registered with the computer server and is added to the daily results,
2) it moves us to the ‘Thank You’ page where tiles bearing the names of that day’s site sponsors are displayed. There is absolutely no charge to us ; the food is fully paid for by the sponsors.
The site’s sponsors pay for our daily click. The sponsors purchase tiles on the website for a certain amount of time. Bhookh.com then tabulates the number of people who click during that time frame and bill the sponsor for the appropriate amount. “Bhookh.com” donates this money to the Indian chapter of UN World Food Programme towards food for the chronically hungry.
Once a day, we can click on the “Give Free Food” button and fund the purchase and distribution of a cup of staple food for a person in need. Each sponsor on the Thank You page pays per click. The amount paid is based on the type and structure of advertising agreement they have with Bhookh.com. The two keys to the success of Bhookh.com are sponsors, and visitors like us . The more sponsors the site has, the more food is given to the hungry with each click. The more visitors who click each day, the greater the total amount of food we give to the hungry. So we must remember to click every day. And if we know of an organization that would want to sponsor “Bhookh.com”, we may email at info@bhookh.com In addition to the organization’s name, we have to also include any contact information.
We can click only once a day on the website for feeding the hungry and starving children. Our agreement with our sponsors are such that the server can only count only one click, per person, per calendar day. The new calendar day starts at midnight Indian Standard Time.
A monitoring system is set up to check this. While we could click on the button a hundred times, this would only generate one cup of food. In the meantime, our system would be slowed down, or possibly overloaded, preventing other visitors’ clicks from generating funding.
There are two ways we can show support to the starving hungry people:-
1. We can visit “bhookh.com” website everyday and spread the word.
2. The web-site needs as many sponsors as possible as the traffic on the site
keeps growing and more and more cups of food are required to be donated. If we know someone who is interested in sponsoring we can ask them to email at info@bhookh.com.
We have to remind ourselves the following facts and try to do our best by daily clicking in the website to feed the hungry and starving people:-
1. Hunger and Starvation remains the No.1 cause of death in the world.
2. 1/3rd of the world’s hungry people live in India.
3. 5 Indians die every minute from hunger and starvation.
4. 25 lakh Indians die every year from hunger and starvation.
The biggest obstacle we face in changing attitudes toward overpopulation is economists. Since the field of economics was branded “the dismal science” after Malthus’ theory, economists have been adamant that they would never again consider the subject of overpopulation and continue to insist that man is ingenious enough to overcome any obstacle to further growth. This is why world leaders continue to ignore population growth in the face of mounting challenges like peak oil, global warming and a whole host of other environmental and resource issues. They believe we’ll always find technological solutions that allow more growth.
But because they are blind to population growth, there’s one obstacle they haven’t considered: the finiteness of space available on earth. The very act of using space more efficiently creates a problem for which there is no solution: it inevitably begins to drive down per capita consumption and, consequently, per capita employment, leading to rising unemployment and poverty.
If you‘re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, then I invite you to visit either of my web sites at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com or PeteMurphy.wordpress.com where you can read the preface, join in the blog discussion and, of course, buy the book if you like.
Please forgive the somewhat spammish nature of the previous paragraph, but I don’t know how else to inject this new theory into the debate about overpopulation without drawing attention to the book that explains the theory.
Pete Murphy
Author, “Five Short Blasts”