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Building on Amartya Sen's famous claim that no famine has ever occurred in a democratic country, this volume examines the relationship between democracy, public action and famine prevention in India.
Inspired by the work of Amartya Sen, whose influential hypothesis that democratic institutions together with a free press provide effective protection from famine, Democracy and Famine is a study combining qualitative and quantitative evidence, analysing the effect of democracy on famine prevention.
This book analyses the role of public action in solving the problem of hunger in the modern world and is divided into four parts: Hunger in the modern world, Famines, Undernutrition and deprivation, and Hunger and public action.
"In 1968 Magnus Pyke argued that what "human communities choose to eat is only partly dependent on their physiological requirements, and even less on intellectual reasoning and a knowledge of what these physiological requirements are." Pyke, a nutritional scientist who had worked under the Chief Scientific Advisor to Britain's Ministry of Food during the Second World War, illustrated his point by recounting that in preparing the nation for war, military officials had demanded that land be allocated to grow gherkins. They had insisted, Pyke recalled, that the British soldier "could not fight without a proper supply of pickles to eat with his cold meat." The Ministry of War had apparently been "unmoved to learn from the nutritional experts" that pickles offered little of material value to the diet, as they had almost no calories, vitamins, or minerals. The Ministry of Food, Pyke asserted, nevertheless designated precious agricultural land for gherkin cultivation. For what the human body requires, this former government official conceded, often needs to be subordinate to what "the human being to whom the body belongs" desires.1 This pickle episode exemplifies why a book about government feeding must be more than merely a study of the impact of food science on state policy. The nutritional sciences, which began to emerge in the late eighteenth century and made significant advances from the 1840s,2 established that the nutritive and energy potential of food could be measured, calibrated, and deployed. Food science might have been one of the "engine sciences" that Patrick Carroll positions as central to modern state formation, particularly in the British Isles.3 But if science was integral to modern forms of governance, it must nevertheless be understood not as preceding and dictating state action but rather, as Christopher Hamlin has argued, as "a resource parties appeal to (or make up as they go along) for use wherever authority is needed: to authorize themselves to act, to compete for the public's interest and money, to neutralize real or potential critics."4 That there was "a sharp division" between "theoretical knowledge" of nutrition and "its practical implementation"5 was thus often strategic"--
History.
Part of a major report on world hunger instigated by the World Institute for Development Economics Research, this volume deals with possible solutions to the problem of regular outbreaks of famine in various parts of the world.
Demographic considerations are central to an understanding of famine, which is in turn essental for the formulation of an appropriate famine prevention policy. Arup Maharatna uses a wealth of historical material to develop a conceptual framework for examining the relationship between various demographic processes and famines in India during the colonial and post-colonial periods.
The Political Economy of Hunger is the classic analysis of an extraordinary paradox: in a world of food surpluses and satiety, hunger kills millions more people each year than wars or political repression. Now this abridged version, edited by Athar Hussain, puts the most influential essays from the three-volume work within the reach of concerned citizens. Ranging from Africa to South Asia to China, and written by an international array of authorities, the essays included in this abridgement give the best available analysis of the causes of worldwide hunger and deprivation, and the best hope for effective aid policies in the future.