It’s more than thirty years that Amartya Sen made the fundamental argument in Poverty and Famines (1981) that the problem of hunger is not about shortage of food, but people’s right to get to the food that was there. The Right to Food campaign in India seems to have won the argument. A bill currently under consideration accepts the principle of a right to food, and aims to deliver it by subsidies of basic grains.
There are doubts, of course, about India’s capacity to deliver the right effectively. And, as reported last month, a third of the world’s poorest people are in India.