Why India’s diabetes epidemic is a policy failure
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India is sleepwalking toward a diabetes disaster. An estimated 101 million Indians are living with diabetes and an additional 136 million are pre-diabetic, said an Indian Council of Medical Research-India Diabetes study published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology in July 2023.
The International Diabetes Federation’s Diabetes Atlas, puts the figure even higher, at 89.8 million diagnosed adults, with projections suggesting that number will grow to a massive 156.7 million in 2050.
India is referred to as the diabetes capital of the world. But what makes the country’s crisis so uniquely devastating is how this is the product of a form of structural violence perpetuated by economic policy failures, the collapse of the food system and the chronic neglect of the well-being of working-class Indians.
The cruelty of this situation is compounded when accounting for the low wage rates in India. There has been a virtual stagnation of real wages since 2014, according to data from the Labour Bureau related to rural India, analysed by economists Jean Dreze and Arindam Das.
In the decade leading to that period, the increase in real wages was strong at 5% to 6% a year. But in the succeeding decade, the rate of increase has been close to zero.
Meanwhile, the India Employment Report 2024 of the International Labour Organisation...