The Politics of Food Security in India

The essays collected in this book deal with various aspects of food security in a developing country like India, which is house for a large number of poor people living with hunger and malnutrition. Written over a period of more than two decades since the 1990s, these essays examine the macro level food security of India in terms of the long-term log linear trends in the minimum requirement of 2100 calories in urban areas and 2400 calories in rural areas, as recommended long ago by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
Some of the notable features of this collection, inter alia, include: (1) The contribution of the Green Revolution, despite enabling India to escape from the demeaning “ship to mouth” existence under the PL-480 trappings could not sustain for long because of the absence of state support to improve research and technology, even though the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), the largest institution of its kind anywhere in the world, is working under the Government of India. (2) Even scholars from the North-East treat that region as a terrorist infested forest area. In this collection, whenever food insecurity comes up for discussion, the North-East takes a major share. (3) The researchers have been treating the PDS in Kerala as the best of its kind in the country. Using the records available in the United Nations Organisation and the Programme Evaluation Organisation of the erstwhile Planning Commission, an essay incorporated in this collection shows that it is one of the worst PDS in India. (4) After India signed the Agreement on Agriculture under the WTO regime, several intellectuals and senior bureaucrats argued that the country would now become food surplus. Our analysis shows that, during the WTO era, India’s food insecurity and indebtedness exacerbated so that thousands of farmers started committing suicide as never before in its economic history. (5) India exported foodgrains at less than the BPL issue price at a time when a large number of poor in the country could not get subsidised foodgrains. Similarly, it imported foodgrains not when it had grain deficiency but when the WTO rules required so.