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Conclusion: Landscapes of Hunger in Contemporary India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2018

Benjamin Robert Siegel
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Summary

A brief conclusion reviews the state of India's food predicament in the years since the introduction of Green Revolution technologies. This review of developments since the 1970s suggests the ways in which the transformation of the food problem from a political concern to a technocratic one, and the rise of a politic emphasizing production over equitable distribution, has narrowed the opportunities for a creative solution of India's food problem. The evidence of this foreclosure, this conclusion suggests, is found in the unsettling statistics concerning India's devastating levels of hunger and malnutrition. Even as India holds and exports great quantities of food, its entrepreneurs run major agro-industrial projects overseas, and obesity and diabetes plague the nation’s wealthy, the nation is home to a quarter of the world’s starving population (230 million people), forty percent of Indian children still suffer from malnutrition, and political parties can make immense capital over the promise of a “full roti” for every citizen. India’s failure on the food front is framed, in this conclusion and this book, by a historical winnowing of possibility, and a move away from the ideals of equity and welfare which animated nationalists and fueled decades of vital debate.
Type
Chapter
Information
Hungry Nation
Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India
, pp. 220 - 233
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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