As crops rot, millions go hungry in India

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/07/01/uk-india-wheat-idUKBRE8600KB20120701

by tokenadult • 14 years ago

174 175 14 years ago

uk.reuters.com

ashray2• 14 years ago

This is SHAMEFUL!

I'm a web developer and I want to solve this distribution problem. I've been trying to think of a business model to sustain it but have come up with nothing.

Ideas ?

excuse-me5• 14 years ago

Indian has a space program, a nuclear weapons program and now owns British Steel and LandRover - and we send them aid to feed themselves !

ashray2• 14 years ago

Also has enough food to feed themselves. But are tripping over time and again =/

latch3• 14 years ago

The United States of American has a space program, a nuclear program, own a lot and 1 in 5 children are living in poverty.

You can say the same about almost any country.

The state of poverty and despair in western countries is far more mind boggling to me than in developing countries.

modoc2• 14 years ago

True but AFAIK no other countries are spending their tax money providing food aid to the USA?

I agree our own poverty situation is awful, but honestly that's another reason to not be spending tax money the US International Food Aid Program. What if we spent that ~1.2 billion each year on feeding our hungry children, trying to reduce the number of families in poverty etc..?

excuse-me5• 14 years ago

The definition of poverty in the US and India is a little different, in the USA it means a family income of less than $43,512 a year - in India it means dying of starvation.

Not wishing to belittle the struggle of so many US families - but this isn't quite the same thing.

alokm2• 14 years ago

The problem is not lack of food production but distribution. There is a need for a lot of investment in infrastructure.

rdl4• 14 years ago

What keeps India's infrastructure basically third-world while other (small, but rapidly growing) parts of the economy are world-class?

tintin122• 14 years ago

Yeah its not fair is it?

British went to India (on what visa?) and looted the country shipping everything valuable to Britain. And now British can't let Indians into their country because of visa restrictions? That is fair right?

excuse-me5• 14 years ago

Or Britain liberated India from a Mughal conqueror and put the Hindus back in charge.

American's also don't let Brits in because of Visa issues - and after we, almost successfully, taught them to speak English

escherplex• 14 years ago

"Tehran will not be falling over itself to buy because of concern that Indian grain may be tainted by fungal disease"

That's what I was wondering. There is something making the rounds called Ug99, a form of wheat rust capable of destroying 80 percent of all known wheat varieties (PBS). The protocols may be inept but to what extent could the government just be trying to contain a botanical pandemic?

Ancient• 14 years ago

I'm curious if this has anything to do as a result of India banning Monsanto for bio-piracy.

jandrewrogers2• 14 years ago

Ignoring the crop subsidies for a moment, there was a similar issue in the US for many years. In the little farming town where I grew up, there was a giant mountain of grain dumped outside of town where excess grain was left to rot (and like the article stated, it reeks).

People often wonder why excess grain is dumped instead of shipped off as aid to people that can't afford it. The reason is simple but complex in its implications: the grain is worth less than the cost to move it somewhere else. In addition to the loss of underutilized grain, someone has to pay even more money to move it that in the net is not a cost efficient way to get food to the people that need it relative to not using dumped grain. So the grain is dumped.

One way to improve the situation is to invest in infrastructure to reduce the logistical cost, allowing the grain to compete across a wider range of market prices. However, that investment in infrastructure has to be offset by return on the grain production it effectively allows and has to account for the unpredictability of a global market that the subsidies are crudely trying to mitigate. There is a diminishing return.

One of the big issues in the global market is that grain trade tends to be highly protectionist, in part for food security reasons. While some countries (like the US) produce grain in vast quantities at low cost, most governments do not want to be dependent on foreign countries for their food. At the same time, these policies increase the price and restrict flow of food in these countries in times when the global market is a much more efficient producer. Subsidies and protectionism tend to be very blunt instruments.

protomyth2• 14 years ago

Not to question your story, but was that grain actually discarded or was it outside storage by the grain elevator. It is pretty standard procedure for grain elevators to have outside piles to store excess grain until shipment. You lose a little and you have to watch moisture when you mix it, but for elevators, it is definitely not a loss.

jandrewrogers2• 14 years ago

It was about a half mile from the grain elevators but no one ever retrieved it. They only dumped it there in the years when the market was excessively soft; there were more convenient places to buy cheap grain. In years when the market was good nothing ever ended up at the grain dump.

That whole region had ridiculous yields for years after Mt. St. Helens blew (it was in the ash plume -- great fertilizer) but they had difficulty moving that volume economically during years when the rest of the country had high yields. Or at least that is my recollection as a kid. Once they started dumping grain, the pile only got bigger.

ChuckMcM5• 14 years ago

"One way to improve the situation is to invest in infrastructure to reduce the logistical cost, allowing the grain to compete across a wider range of market prices."

I have seen these sort of 'inversions' as well. As an engineer I've pondered whether or not you could create enough infrastructure to create a non-spoiling product which returned enough capital to move the rest. So in the grain situation you might create a simple distillery which produced grain alcohol, which was sold to cover the cost of moving excess grain to locations where it could be used. Grain alcohol has a number of used and it doesn't spoil, further processing grain into alcohol is a relatively self sufficient process (you can use the alcohol produced to run the distiller and still get net positive output.) It of course presumes free grain.

One of the more curious social effects I've witnessed is that someone will dump grain which is too expensive to move, but they are less willing to simply give it to you for your distillery. They note you're getting an economic benefit from their grain (which is true) but they are unwilling to build their own distillery and capture that value but still won't cede the value to someone who does that original investment.

kamaal16• 14 years ago

>>They note you're getting an economic benefit from their grain (which is true) but they are unwilling to build their own distillery and capture that value but still won't cede the value to someone who does that original investment.

I think this is because, 'If I'm not gaining anything, you shouldn't either' attitude.

Programmers would be pissed if the code written by them gets used by somebody else to make money, while they don't make any money out of it. Isn't this the whole Java debate these days all about. Sun/Oracle aren't getting much money out of Java(While writing/maintaining/advertising it) while the whole world is using it to make money.

btilly4• 14 years ago

The fundamental economic problem is that demand is very inelastic. When you draw a supply-demand curve for food it looks very close to a vertical line, people do not buy significantly more food when you make it cheaper, people do not buy significantly less food until they run out of money.

The implication is that even slight excesses result in rock bottom prices, and even slight shortages result in very high prices. This volatility is bad for everyone. Therefore the government steps in with subsidies to even out how much farmers get, and to guarantee a surplus to avoid ruinous food prices for consumers.

But there is simply no good way to do this without perverse consequences somewhere...

puivert• 14 years ago

People buy meat when they have more money than required for sustenance, which takes much more grain than direct consumption.

moonchrome2• 14 years ago

>Therefore the government steps in with subsidies to even out how much farmers get, and to guarantee a surplus to avoid ruinous food prices for consumers.

Yeah it's not like there are mechanisms to deal with this sort of volatility (hint - futures).

ars2• 14 years ago

> people do not buy significantly more food when you make it cheaper, people do not buy significantly less food until they run out of money.

That's not really accurate. Yes, the total amount of food may not change, but the type of food changes quite a bit. People will eat less desirable, but cheaper food.

Retric2• 14 years ago

It becomes highly elastic over longer time periods, if you can cheaply store it for one year you can feed to to cows / chickens / pigs and then eat them.

spodek• 14 years ago

That people starve while food rots isn't rare. We've known about the effect for decades. If you aren't familiar with Amartya Sen, he won a Nobel Prize in part for his research into famines, pointing out their causes not only in food shortages but distribution. Quoting Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen (sorry so long a quote but his work is fascinating and I'm interested to read other thoughts from this community )--

In 1981, Sen published Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), 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.[17] However, this argument has recently been undermined by evidence suggesting significant decline in food availability in the Bengal Famine.[18] This implies the curious irony that Sen had bought into precisely the excuse used by the War Cabinet to refuse aid to Bengal -- that hoarding, not a lack of food, was the famine's cause.

Sen's interest in famine stemmed from personal experience. As a nine-year-old boy, he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million people perished. This staggering loss of life was unnecessary, Sen later concluded. He presents data that there was an adequate food supply in Bengal at the time, but particular groups of people including rural landless labourers and urban service providers like haircutters did not have the monetary means to acquire food as its price rose rapidly due to factors that include British military acquisition, panic buying, hoarding, and price gouging, all connected to the war in the region. In Poverty and Famines, Sen revealed that in many cases of famine, food supplies were not significantly reduced. In Bengal, for example, food production, while down on the previous year, was higher than in previous non-famine years. Thus, Sen points to a number of social and economic factors, such as declining wages, unemployment, rising food prices, and poor food-distribution systems. These issues led to starvation among certain groups in society. His capabilities approach focuses on positive freedom, a person's actual ability to be or do something, rather than on negative freedom approaches, which are common in economics and simply focuses on non-interference. In the Bengal famine, rural laborers' negative freedom to buy food was not affected. However, they still starved because they were not positively free to do anything, they did not have the functioning of nourishment, nor the capability to escape morbidity.

nodemaker• 14 years ago

To add, I recommend the book "Late Victorian Holocausts" by Mike Davis for readers interested about famines.

steve8918• 14 years ago

Didn't a similar thing happen during the Great Depression? I thought FDR ordered livestock, etc, destroyed in order to keep their prices up. I'm sure lots of Americans were going hungry at that time, so the outrage must have been huge.

muhfuhkuh• 14 years ago

It lasted less than 6 months before they created the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, which instead of creating artificial scarcity bought the stocks and distributed it (some 600 Million pounds of grain, cotton, and meat) to impoverished sectors across the US.

dools2• 14 years ago

This is basically what Grapes of Wrath is about.

dhawalhs• 14 years ago

There is a another book that goes into detail about the Bengal famine called "Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II"

http://www.amazon.com/Churchills-Secret-War-British-Ravaging...

simplefish• 14 years ago

So let's summarize: The Indian government spends billions of dollars (which are desperately needed for other purposes in a poor country like India) propping up the price of wheat. This causes many farmers to switch from growing vegetables to wheat. The drives up the price of vegetables, and would drive down the price of wheat, except for political reasons the Indian government would rather let the wheat rot than give it away cheaply. As a result, many of the poor can't afford wheat, and the ones who can can't afford anything but wheat, leading to rampant malnutrition.

Or even shorter: India spends billions of dollars on a policy that does nothing except ensure they have a rate of child malnutrition almost twice that of sub-saharan Africa.

tl;dr: Socialism, lol.

(Oh, and as Spodek pointed out, famines are caused by a lack of money, not food. It's been known for DECADES that if you want to stop people starving, you need to give them cash, and cut barriers to trade.)

w1ntermute2• 14 years ago

I don't think it's yet even at the level where you can start debating socialism vs. other systems. In India, there are endemic problems with enforcing the law, especially with respect to the wealthy/privileged. Just ensuring that no one can flout the law and get away unscathed would go a long way in alleviating these sorts of issues.

kang• 14 years ago

Rant : There is no implementation of any kind. No scalability of judicial,medical etc systems due to the population, largely self-centered mindset, lack of time to keep up with huge economic gaps, most importantly the country being ruled by goons (more than half of Indian leaders have criminal records). Getting into Indian political system is simply not possible for a person, necessary to initiate a change.

Researches study, but the figures they come up are far far away from reality. That is because everything exists on paper just not practically.

yummyfajitas5• 14 years ago

Could you explain how would enforcing the law against the wealthy/privileged affect this situation at all?

Please be specific about the mechanics.

Symmetry6• 14 years ago

Its when you have problems enforcing the law that you most need to start worrying about the size of the government. If you had a process of weird and unfair price supports but a government that functioned pretty well (like we do in the US) then that sort of sucks but its tolerable. When the government is going that but making a mess of it (like in India) then its not so tolerable.

Gormo• 14 years ago

If what OP said is true, then it seems like the weakness of law enforcement in India is the only thing that prevents these bad policies from causing a full-on disaster.

Vigilant enforcement of bad laws is not a good thing.

creamyhorror3• 14 years ago

India is an actual democracy (edit: should have said semi-capitalist or mixed economy, sorry), not a socialist state, mind you. The trouble here is bureaucracy and mismanagement. The government is trying to prop up farmers, but this comes at the expense of millions of its citizens. (Note that most other governments aren't anywhere as dysfunctional, in case you were thinking of blaming 'big government'.)

The Indian government is known to have very serious problems with mismanagement and corruption (worse than many other Asian countries). Witness what was practically the giving away of the communications spectrum to private companies a few years ago, due to sheer ignorance on the part of the minister responsible. India's government needs to be reformed quite fundamentally.

JumpCrisscross• 14 years ago

Socialism is an economic system; democracy is a system of governance. India is a socialist democracy. It is not communist but it also not a liberal democracy à la Fukuyama et al.

chrismsnz• 14 years ago

Not sure how that example is indicative of Socialism.

More generally I would say it was interventionist, but very poorly handled. The issue is because they don't know what they're doing, rather than that they are subscribed to a certain style of government.

mistermumble• 14 years ago

I agree that corruption and incompetence can be found in all nominal styles of government. The labels (socialist, capitalist) are distractions from the unpleasant reality.

That said, I wonder: Are farm subsidies in India that much different than farm subsidies in the US?

US farm subsidies seem to be, pardon the expression, sacred cows, supported (or at least not challenged) by both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats.

Even though they result in lakes of high-fructose corn syrup, youth obesity (especially among lower-income groups), and high health-related costs to society (especially the uninsured).

gleb• 14 years ago

BTW, India requires that only jute bags produced by a protected local industry be used for storage. No plastic or foreign jute. Not surprisingly there are not enough bags.

This is contributing to the problem: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230444140457748...

rdl4• 14 years ago

Isn't India the country which developed non-violent mass civil protest?

It seems crazy that people wouldn't just use plastic bags in open defiance during a serious shortage.

antidoh• 14 years ago

"tl;dr: Socialism, lol."

Corruption and incompetence span all political and economic systems.

brc• 14 years ago

Those disagreeing that this is socialism aren't really attuned to the previous socialist attempts and engineering outcomes.

If you really wanted to split hairs, you could say this is an example for those people who think that a government can engineer a better outcome for people than the people just left to their own devices.

EvilTerran2• 14 years ago

"this is an example for those people who think that a government can engineer a better outcome for people than the people just left to their own devices"

Oh, but we don't need an example of that -- we can just compare, say, European nationalised healthcare with the US approach, and see better outcomes for lower cost in the European model.

No-one's ever said government always engineers better outcomes. A few examples only serve to knock down a straw-man.

EvilTerran2• 14 years ago

Summarising this article with "Socialism, lol" is about as valid as summarising an article about Somalia with "Libertarianism, lol". Your socialists are straw-men.

olalonde• 14 years ago

yaix• 14 years ago

Making an ideological debate of it is a sure way into desaster.

"""has been known for decates"""

Thst is actually only partially true, as has been proven in a number of experiments and shown in the book "Poor Economy".

Poor people that reach a higher level of income will generally not buy /more/ food to satisfy their actual needs, but will switch to buy /more expensive/ food (aka "better tasting"), often even /reducing/ their number of calories consumed.

Part of the problem is lack of money, but the main problem is lack of knowledge/education.

vilhelm_s• 14 years ago

I wonder if farmers could arbitrage the government by buying grain at the market price and then selling at the fixed price...

Zenst• 14 years ago

Reminds me of the early days of the EU nd butter mountain.

The indian goverment needs to build storage, build a transport system to replace the old british one that is dated. So many things theyt could be doing and should of been doing and yet all the warning signs get ignored.

Firstly they need to look at the price they pay as the sad fact they have paid so much has allowed the GM crops to sneak in via various crop priomises and alot of farmers jumped onto that bandwagon, found themselfs in debt they could not pay and cmmiting suicide to maintain honour. So any drop in price would be impacting and needs to be done slowly. You cant hook a farmer onto a subsidy crack-pipe without weaning them off slowly, but there again people dont apprecieate that money can also be a drug.

Sadly this pattern of growth/overstock etc is common in many area's of the World over time and as I mentioned the whole butter mountain/dairy one the EU had in its early days being a good enough example. Exports would be one area, though they will take a loss, but better a small loss than losing it all.

anmol2• 14 years ago

Governance in India consists of terrible mismanagement and obscene corruption. The country's growth has been driven by the private sector and privatization.

Its so entrenched in the billion person economy, there simply seems to be no way for the educated classes to have an impact and change this. Any ideas on how this can be changed?

Synaesthesia• 14 years ago

Something similar in South Africa. At least India has decent mass education, the only way I see out. You need everyone to be educated, connected and have a true participatory democracy.

kamaal16• 14 years ago

The problem is everybody talks against corruption, but when they themselves get a chance to be corrupt they go for it.

People feel what they do is right, and what others do is wrong. No matter what the truth is.

kamaal16• 14 years ago

There is more than one reason for why India is in this problem today. And taking simplistic view points can't explain this problem completely.

Firstly Farming in India is currently very unproductive. To understand why this happens, you have to understand some history. India was even from its very existence in history a huge sub continent ruled big and small kingdoms, with Agriculture as its main source of work. And Farmers were always taxed in return for many things. Add to this shortage of rainfall, droughts and other occasional problems forced farmers to mortgage their lands for some money to rich landlords. These problems went to an extent till farmers were almost synonymous with slaves. The Naxal terrorism problems has deep roots in this history.

I have many friends who come families of farmers. And you can still hear the old stories. The lands get passed on from generation to generation through inheritance. And every time the land is inherited it gets divided among sons. So with every generation each person gets lesser and lesser land to harvest on. With growing population you can now image with each generation, number of farmers increase but the land available for farming decreases. This makes farming a highly unproductive business in India.

This is coupled lack of modern logistics to distribute, modern machinery or harvesting and farming. All these stories of rotting grains that your hear of is because, the crops are often sold to local middlemen with farmers often given an unfair deal. The middle men take real hefty cut, and both the farmers and consumers suffer. Also middle men again sell to places called 'mandis' which inturn are very inefficient ways of distribution.

The policies ran by Government of India utmost work as patch jobs. There is no long term vision to improve the situation of farmers. Providing subsidized pump sets, lower interest loans etc only give the farmer a longer rope to hang himself. There are no incentives to bring in larger agricultural reforms, to modernize distribution, to eliminate middle men(In fact in the recent FDI debate, some MP's actually sided with the middlemen, can you believe that?), to improve logistics, cut corruption, fight bureaucracy, bring in mass farming techniques, infrastructure and equipment.

Agriculture policies are just one election to the next bait to get farmer votes.

Tichy4• 14 years ago

How did India get to it's huge population, though? I would have thought that if you don't have food, eventually the population stops growing?

kamaal16• 14 years ago

We didn't have famines that killed in millions.

Even until say a generation and half back. During my Dad's times it was quite usual for couples to >10 kids. It was considered a sign of pride!

Apart from that there are other social issues. Social security is a huge problem in India, Pension is a cruel joke. Other form of income during old age include rent from real estate or meagerly savings. Amidst all this kids are considered as a somebody who can take care of their parents.

For the west this might sound strange, but parents are a integral part of the family. In fact family means Parents, siblings and their kids included.

In all this Boys are considered cash cows. Because they are perceived as somebody who can earn and feed them in old age. Girls are considered money drains, as they marry and go away to their husbands home, to never return or contribute much. There is also a huge problem of dowry(Mandatory gifts given to girls during marriage) which makes girls look like burdens. The Indian middle class is also shy to send Girls to work.

All this contributes to 'reproduce until you get a boy' problem. The rest is left to your imagination. Especially when more population leads to more of it, merely by its very dynamics.

So you see the problem isn't that simple. Sometimes its genuine. Imagine you are old, need food, clothes, medical care. You need money for it, you see your neighbor get all the help from his son. While you get no help from your daughters.

The natural reaction is ... 'If at all, I had a son... I wouldn't be in this state today'.

These problems are not that simple to solve.

pm905• 14 years ago

that's a very good question. The fertility rate is very high amongst the poor, although they seem to have the worst means to support many children. I guess the main reason is that women were/are not empowered enough to decide how many kids they should have. Another major factor is lack of availability/knowledge of contraceptives. Also, I think children provide the only "entertainment"(using this word very loosely) when you have no TV, no books etc; there may also be a feeling that having many children gurantees that some will survive to carry their "family" ahead (many might die due to lack of access to healthcare). Lastly, child labour. Most of these are purely speculative though. Its what I picked up when I asked my parents precisely the same thing

skrish• 14 years ago

One of the primary reasons is the inability to match the supply-demand cycle. There are a few startups trying to solve this issue in their own way.

I heard one of the founders speak http://www.efarm.in (he runs another site connecting farmers called http://www.efarmdirect.com). His views are quite interesting and he is using IT as an enabler to solve some of the issues. They are trying to use basic mobile phones to gather supply info, feed that information above the chain.

eriksank2• 14 years ago

Difficult to reach two different goals at the same time with just one instrument. So, supporting the farmers means keeping prices high. Supporting the poor means keeping prices low. No matter how much anybody patches the system, the contradiction will remain in place.

robomartin2• 14 years ago

Further evidence that governments should be as limited as possible in their access and control of our lives. Nearly everything they touch has ugly short and long-term consequences spanning from financial to millions of people dying.

I know that the issues in India are far more complex than this. I am over-simplifying in a gross manner. That said, I can't help but feel that "civilization" has degenerated into the lunatics running the asylum world-over. I don't know what the solution might be, but it is almost unthinkable to see millions of people dying rather than millions of people mounting a revolt to take control of what is rightly theirs: Their country, their land, their resources and their very lives.

Here's a case where the actions of a few in power are likely a huge part of the reason for millions dying every year. What is wrong with humanity?

intended3• 14 years ago

Yes. It is a gross simplification.

For reference: soon after being formed, India was given 0 chance of survival, with a common theme being that the country would soon break up into a million different states.

That country with more languages, cultures and dialects than Babel is still here.

Further, for the longest time India depended on foreign aid to feed its people. Until they finally did something about it and ushered in the green revolution which turned Punjab and many other states into bread baskets. India has gone from a place where people died in famines to a place where they can actually worry about improving nutrition standards.

And the subsidies being reviled today played an important part before to make this discussion happen in the first place.

India built the IITs. Which went on to power companies across the globe.

They built their own space program, and they also built the Non Aligned movement during the cold war, which was a pretty nifty achievement.

They currently supply some of the larger contingents to the UN. (And some of those contingents are mired in corruption charges.)

India is a stupidly complicated country. I could go on for pages about its ills, at the same time point out genuine accomplishments it has achieved.

Edit: removed a line which was argumentative.

robomartin2• 14 years ago

I would go farther and say that mine was a grotesque over-simplification.

One has to admit that there is something wrong with the way governments are working world-wide (not just India or the US). Examples abound of everything from flat-out government corruption to governments making decisions which often-times have consequences that affect millions in very negative ways. It's a weird time because we are so connected that it is easy to see these things happening all across the world. Fifty years ago it was very hard for the average citizen of any country to get a play-by-play account of what was going on around the world.

Today you can get a good picture within an hour of sitting down at your computer. One of the pictures I am getting is that we have all allowed governments to do more than they should. And we are all paying for it in one way or another. To be auto-critical, the disastrous economic downturn that we have been navigating through was nearly 100% caused by the US government deciding that it was politically important to put into place a framework that allowed almost anyone to own a home. Yes, private enterprise and Wall Street took it from there. It was government that enabled and promoted this and provided the ecosystem within which the disaster was created. Other examples of this are wars nobody wants, military bases all over the world and foreign aid that often ends in the hands of dictators and questionable characters.

Being hopeful, I see a future where the Internet connects people to the point where governments simply won't be able to cause so much damage at the local or global level. I think that era is slowly coming to an end.

gingerjoos2• 14 years ago

> Nearly everything they touch has ugly short and long-term consequences spanning from financial to millions of people dying

err.. you're talking about the Wall Street and big pharma types, right? Oh wait, no.

iwwr• 14 years ago

The problem appears to be:

"The ruling party has been the worst manager of the demand-supply of food grains."

the very idea that a political entity can 'manage' supply and demand.

kamaal16• 14 years ago

'No matter what happens, I am not responsible' is the attitude of nearly all of us.

When asked who actually is.. The answer is obvious.

'Its the government'.

nsns2• 14 years ago

The main problem is the PDS [1] in certain Indian states. In other states, where the PDS works (e.g. Tamil Nadu), things are better.

The article is very simplistic and alarmist. Things are much more complex, and it's high time Western readers stopped using the "developing" (read: industrial) world to boost their perceived moral superiority.

Why are political articles about the US not allowed on HN, but Indian are?

[1] http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1711/17110710.htm

realrocker3• 14 years ago

It was not submitted as a political problem, but the discussions have devolved into a political debate. Sad.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

Politics is the art of allocating resources.

hastur• 14 years ago

I just hope someone doesn't come up with the stupid idea that this story is not tech related and kill it on HN.

As many "hackers" work on the next farting iPhone app or the next photo-sharing service that will leverage your social graph to puss fake viagra ads, stories like this need to be promoted to shame people chasing pathetic first-world problems.

xfhai• 14 years ago

This kind of old news. This has been a problem for many years. But this year there has been no rain yet in Bangalore. I suppose the rains should have started in beginning of June. Many farmers who planted the seeds expecting rains, have lost crops. So, there could be use of excess stocks this year.

known2• 14 years ago

"Power will go to the hands of rogues and freebooters. All Indian leaders will be of low caliber and men of straw. They will have sweet tongues and silly hearts. They will fight amongst themselves for power and India will be lost in political squabbles" --Winston Churchill

known2• 14 years ago

India needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika

Former USSR republics are prospering well. http://doingbusiness.org/rankings and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...

As crops rot, millions go hungry in India

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