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 layman readers interested in the history, geography and political economy of food policy and food issues.
Rs. 775 Roupies Indiennes
Frederic Landy is Professor of Geography at the University of Paris-Ouest-Nanterre-La Defense (laboratory GECKO); a honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France and an associate member of the Centre for Indian and South Asian Studies (CEIAS), Paris. He has co-authored with B. Dorin Food and Agriculture in India (Manohar, 2009) and co-edited Reconfiguring Identities and Building Territories in India and South Africa (Manohar, 2005) as well as Globalization and Local Development in India: Examining the Spatial Dimension (Manohar, 2004).
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