Finally, food shortage/mismanagement in food supplies at Thar gets a response. This reminds me Amartya Sens discussion on famines and democracy. In 1981, Sen published Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, a book in which he argued that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. Sen also argued that the Bengal famine was caused by an urban economic boom that raised food prices, thereby causing millions of rural workers to starve to death when their wages did not keep up. To quote Sen: Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence …they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:23:53 +0000