Feeding India: The Spatial Parameters of Food Grain Policy

With the support of numerous maps, this unique volume retells the spatial history of the Indian public food system: initially based on compulsory sales and imports, later graduating to agricultural support prices. From a restricted number of only urban beneficiaries in the beginning, to its spread to rural areas; from an import-dependent State to a self-sufficient cereal producing State. A system that played its part in the success of the Green Revolution by guaranteeing outlets for farmers, which showed the way to an improvement in the calorie intake of the population, but seldom that of the nutritional situation and had significant pernicious effects in terms of its ecological consequences. A system that also contained obvious geopolitical dimensions which made the integration of the four corners of the Indian Union possible within the same structure. The author argues that, if successive governments did not reduce the PDS' enormous spatial coverage, it was partly because of a concept of territorial integration and aggregation, developed in equal measure by Hindu nationalism and Nehruvian thought. This book shall be of immense interest to scholars, students, decision makers and laymen readers interested in the history, geography and political economy of food policy and food issues.