A farmer in Nashik helplessly watches his onion harvest rot in the open after the rains collapse the roof of the local storage. A group of farmers in Bihar throws tonnes of tomatoes on the road as the prices plummeted far below their expectations.

Meanwhile, in Jharkhand, a mother returns home empty-handed from the ration shop because the supplies ran out before her turn. All this while, in the national capital, caterers at lavish weddings scrape trays of untouched food and throw them into garbage bags. These are not disconnected images. Nor are they figments of imagination.

They are pieces of the same story that captures the paradox of our food system, which faces both surplus and scarcity, bounty and hunger, waste and want, all at the same time.

Last week, the world commemorated the "International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste." It is not a day that features prominently in the global event calendar. Yet its urgency could not be greater.

Globally, one-third of the food produced never reaches a plate. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Food Waste Report 2024 estimated that 1.05 billion tonnes of food were lost or wasted in 2022 alone, while 735 million people went to bed hungry. The waste occurs at all income levels, whether the rich or the poor. The household food wastage per person per year is estimated to be 81–88 kg per capita. The waste is not just moral. It is material too.

This colossal waste of food also implies a significant waste of water, energy, land, and labour. And when food decomposes in landfills, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide, making food waste one of the most overlooked contributors to climate change.

For India, the contradiction is much sharper. We are the world's second-largest food producer. But we also carry the most significant burden of hunger and malnutrition. The 2024 Global Hunger Index gave us a score of 27.3, placing us in the "serious" category. Although undernourishment rates have declined modestly from 14.3 per cent in 2020–22 to around 12 per cent in 2022–24, the absolute numbers remain staggering.

Over 224 million Indians are still undernourished. One in three children under five is stunted due to chronic malnutrition. Two out of three children under the age of five are anaemic. These are not statistics on a page; they are the lived reality of millions of households for whom food security remains fragile and nutrition an unattainable promise, despite several government schemes, including the National Food Security Act.

Let's compare this with India's food wastage figures. Every year, we waste around 78 million tonnes of food, second only to China globally. Our household-level food wastage accounts for nearly 68.7 million tonnes annually, with the average Indian discarding approximately 55 kilograms of food each year.

According to the UNEP, the food India wastes could feed up to 377 million people, which is more than the entire population of the United States. What makes these numbers shocking is that the losses are not confined to post-consumer waste.

The post-harvest losses are equally severe. A 2022 NABCONS study, commissioned by the Ministry of Food Processing Industries, estimated that India suffers from post-harvest losses worth Rs. 1.52 lakh crore annually, equivalent to nearly 3.7 per cent of our agricultural GDP. Staples like paddy and wheat lose about 4 to 5 per cent of their harvest, while fruits and vegetables can see losses as high as 10 to 15 per cent before they reach the markets.

The reasons for this wastage are depressingly familiar. Poor storage facilities, absence of robust cold chains, gaps in rural transportation, cultural habits of over-purchasing and over-serving, inadequate refrigeration at the household level, and inadequate awareness around food use are reasons that are not unknown.

Weddings and festivals often become arenas of food wastage. It is not uncommon to see a massive quantity of food at such events. This is taken as a sign of abundance without understanding that the excess food will only be discarded at the end of the evening. At the same time, small farmers with perishable produce find themselves unable to transport their goods to markets in time, leaving them no option but to dump their hard-earned harvest on the roadside.

The environmental cost of such waste is devastating. Globally, food waste accounts for 8–10 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. In India alone, post-harvest losses contribute nearly 64.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions each year. To put this into perspective, that is more than the total annual emissions of a medium-sized industrialised country.

Every kilogram of rice thrown away also means the litres of water it took to grow it are wasted. Every fruit that rots represents not just lost calories but also squandered fertiliser, diesel, electricity, and labour. Food waste is not simply a matter of morality in a hungry country; it is a driver of resource depletion, soil degradation, deforestation, and biodiversity loss.

The social implications are equally troubling. Food wastage worsens inequality. It is often the poor who bear the brunt of scarcity while the better-off have the privilege to waste. It erodes the possibility of achieving Sustainable Development Goal 2, "Zero Hunger," and directly undermines the calls for halving per capita global food waste by 2030.

We have made progress in reducing hunger, but those gains remain fragile and uneven. Unless wastage is addressed, we will continue to be trapped in a cycle where the food that could nourish millions instead ends up in landfills, contributing to emissions.

With the largest number of hungry people in the world and as one of the world's top food wasters, we cannot afford to ignore this crisis. It undermines not only human dignity but also our climate commitments and economic efficiency. The annual financial loss of Rs. 1.52 lakh crore due to food wastage is not just a data point; it represents classrooms that could have been built, hospitals that could have been funded, and livelihoods that could have been secured.

The solutions may not be simple, but they are not out of sight either. We need to strengthen our storage and cold-chain infrastructure, as well as initiate behavioural change campaigns through awareness drives focused on portion sizes and how leftover food can bring about a positive change in the lives of the underprivileged. Some of the gaps can be bridged by creating redistribution networks, where surplus food from restaurants, weddings, and hotels is channelled to NGOs and community kitchens.

Most importantly, it is crucial to build accountability into our food system so that waste is not invisible, but visible, measurable, and actionable, thereby aligning our national priorities with the twin goals of sustainability and social justice.

The International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste might have come and gone silently. But for us, the stakes are too high to ignore. A nation that prides itself on its agricultural bounty cannot look away when millions of its people remain hungry. A country that seeks to lead the world on climate action cannot afford to overlook methane seeping out of its landfills. And a society that reveres the food as anna (life-giver) must confront the uncomfortable reality that we are squandering it on a massive scale.

Ultimately, the story of food in India is not just about calories and kilograms. It is about justice and dignity, climate and sustainability, the ethics of waste and the politics of hunger.

India cannot afford to remain the land of both overflowing godowns and empty stomachs. What we need now is urgent accountability to ensure that no grain is lost and no child goes to bed hungry.