The 1943 Bengal famine eclipsed the efforts, that same year, to bring India’s larger cities and towns under statutory rationing. India’s urban working classes cheered on the decision to fully regulate food markets, while producers lamented the implementation of mandatory procurement by the state, and traders raised their voices against what was perceived as an unbridled effort to stamp out their livelihood. By independence, Gandhi had joined the call of wealthy peasants, industrialists, and traders to deregulate the food sector and restore the free market — a move which, when implemented in 1948, saw skyrocketing food prices and a renewed threat of famine. Over the next two decades, this chapter shows, contentious debates over the role of the state in food markets confounded efforts to develop a rationing system which would, as one provincial economic advisor declared, force Indians “to share the common hunger of the country.” As Indians grappled with competing rationing schemes, they debated the roles that the market and intermediaries would play in postcolonial Indian economic life. The 1965 establishment of the Food Corporation of India represented the rise of a competitive system facilitating the political and economic ascent of wealthy agriculturalists in decades to come.