Sir Richard Temple, the lieutenant-governor of Bengal, was sent to manage the situation in the south. Temple had commissioned widespread relief work and a dole while contending with an earlier Bengal famine, in 1873-74, during which only 23 people were reported to have died of hunger. He had been criticised for extravagant spending. The Economist, for instance, accused him of leading Indians to believe that “it is the duty of the Government to keep them alive.”

“Thoroughly chastened,” in Davis’s words, Temple changed tack when confronted with the drought in Madras. Under strict instructions to control government expenditure, he implemented practically inaccessible relief measures. Those who sought paid labour were not allowed to take up work “within a ten-mile radius of their homes.” Rations were provided only if it was certified that a person had become indigent, destitute and capable of only a modicum of labour. If they did get work, their daily ration was a paltry 450 grams of rice. ^[9]

This ration became known as the Temple Wage. Davis writes that it provided less sustenance for hard labour than the diet inside Nazi Germany’s Buchenwald concentration camp. It fell short, by more than half, of the modern calorific standard recommended for adult males by the contemporary Indian government. ^[10] So eager was the administration to protect market prices of food that Temple enacted a law to imprison anyone who offered private donations of grain in Madras.

In the years to come, other bureaucratic sleights of hand were officially disguised as relief measures. To generate a famine fund of £1.5 million, the British raised a salt tax. Between 1877 and 1881, however, the government used that entire fund to offset the loss of tariff on cotton goods imported from Britain and to fund the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

Over time, the response improved partially. The British established Famine Commissions and Famine Codes. The historian Sunil Amrith writes that there were no major famines between 1908 and 1943 after the introduction of transportation and commercialised agriculture. But the damage had already been done. Successive droughts only exacerbated suffering. Nutrition lagged. Diseases such as cholera, plague, scurvy and beri-beri were endemic. During the First World War, Indian soldiers in Mesopotamia died of these diseases in large numbers.

Some colonial bureaucrats attempted to study the roots of the diseases. In 1918, the Indian Research Fund Association (now the Indian Council of Medical Research) issued funds to establish the Beri-Beri Enquiry Unit in Coonoor. ^[11] Research from the unit showed, for the first time, the link between diet and nutritional diseases. Wallace Aykroyd, appointed the director of the Coonoor unit in 1935, published influential studies about standard nutritional requirements.

“As he travelled the length and breadth of South India conducting diet surveys in the later 1930s,” Amrith writes, “Aykroyd became aware of the tendency of colonial ‘development’ to mitigate the risk of absolute starvation but to worsen chronic malnutrition.” It was Aykroyd who first showed that the preponderance of highly milled rice in the south Indian diet led to nutritional deficiencies, especially since the diet lacked “proteins and ‘protective foods’ and particularly leafy vegetables.”

“The system began first in the cities, where there was a focus on the working classes of Calcutta, Bombay and other cities,” explained Madhura Swaminathan, a professor and head of the Economics Analysis Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute in Bengaluru. ^[12]

The allocation was straightforward: half a kilo of grains per person per day. But India did not produce enough food for its population, and had to depend on imports from Burma. When the Japanese annexed Burma in 1942, food entitlements, particularly in Bengal, took a hit. In 1946, the allocation was further reduced to a third of a kilogram after bad harvests. ^[13]

These relief efforts are part of the story of the devastating Bengal famine of 1943 and 1944, which they could not help avert. The Dutch sociologist Jos Mooij has argued that the distribution of food was exclusively focused on urban centres and urban residents. Strikingly, the British did not even declare the Bengal famine as a famine, because, Mooij writes, that “would have brought in an obligation to organise work programmes or relief operations specified by the Famine Code.”

The war effort ate up supplies across the world, which inflated market prices in India. A poor millet harvest of 1946 was followed by a poor wheat harvest in 1947. By November 1946, British India was importing one third of its ration allocations. Faced with inflationary pressures, poor yield and low government procurement prices, Indian farmers responded by hoarding food or selling it on the black market.

Just after independence, Mohandas Gandhi argued against controls on food prices, saying that they “give rise to fraud, suppression of truth, intensification of the black market and to artificial scarcity. “Above all,” he continued, “it unmans the people and deprives them of initiative; it undoes the teachings of self help they have been learning for generations, makes them spoonfed.” ^[14]

Independent India’s first government started to re-examine the procurement system. The Second Foodgrains Policy Committee, led by Bombay cotton baron Sir Purshottamdas Thakurdas, decided that removing restrictions on food grain supply, prices and distribution “would encourage dishoarding without increasing prices significantly.” The government accepted these recommendations and dismantled the ration system in December 1947.

But, by September 1948, controls over prices and procurement of food grains were reintroduced. “Is there a single word in the Constitution that imposes on the future Governments the obligation to see that nobody in India dies of starvation?” M. Ananthasayanam asked the Constituent Assembly the following month. There were more flip-flops over the next few years, but in 1957, after a fresh decline in food production, the government reinstated controls for good.

The Centre began to tweak the system in an attempt both to promote coverage in remote areas (Revamped PDS, 1992) and to limit the distribution of subsidised grains to people below the poverty line (Targeted PDS, 1997). Yet in spite of numerous policy changes, the cost of the food subsidy actually increased from ₹5,000 crore to ₹7,500 crore in 1998.

States continued to control the distribution system. Since they could historically “top-up” with their own benefits, not all states had similar experiences with the revised PDS. In Tamil Nadu, for example, the government had promised to provide rice at ₹1 per kilo as far back as 1967. By 1992, when the Centre introduced the Revamped PDS, which was supposed to introduce the system to rural areas previously not covered, Tamil Nadu’s PDS was already near-universal.

In states like this, where PDS was already seen as a citizen’s right rather than a state’s charity, the backlash to change was swift. In 1997, TN actually had to withdraw the Targeted PDS within just four days of implementation after widespread protests. ^[18]

Overall, however, from 1997 to 2013, only below poverty line (BPL) individuals and their families received subsidised food grains, unless states funded a broader system. Surveys that tried to identify households below the poverty line were often riddled with errors. The poverty line itself was often laughably low. Migrants, the bulk of India’s labour force, could not access subsidised grains away from their homes if they even managed to get registered.

Most ration shops were run by individuals, and not panchayats, co-operative societies or self-help groups. States called for applications depending on how many shops they thought people in different areas needed. Local residents applied to run these shops.

Shop owners, typically people with social capital, often misused the system by making fake ration cards or by giving BPL customers less than their due amount. It wasn’t uncommon for grain to be funnelled into the open market or to be sold back to the government for a higher price. By the 2000s, the National Sample Survey estimated that a staggering 40 to 50 percent of food grains had leaked from the system.

When the system worked, it was because of political will. The economist Jean Drèze tells a story about how Harsh Mander, who was a District Collector in Chhattisgarh in the early 2000s, struggled to coax ration shops to deal honestly with customers, until the government changed.

The new Bharatiya Janata Party government, led by Raman Singh, transformed the entire system. It expanded PDS coverage from the central mandate of 42 percent of households to 74 percent. Community-led cooperatives and self-help groups were given control of ration shops as opposed to businessmen. Shopkeepers grew less inclined to game the system after the commission for each quintal of food distributed was increased from ₹8 to ₹44.

Within two years, people began receiving close to their full entitlement, a change Mander could not previously have imagined. Because of Singh’s three-term government, Drèze told me, the people of Chhattisgarh now see the PDS not as a favour but as a right.

In 2006, the apex court, displeased by the pace of implementation of its orders in the matter, appointed the Justice D.P. Wadhwa Committee to report on how things were going. At the time, BPL individuals were entitled to subsidised rations, but customers who were above the poverty line, or APL, could still buy from ration shops at higher prices.

The system was colour-coded: a white ration card marked you as APL. In Delhi, for instance, this made you eligible to buy rice at ₹9 per kg. BPL households got yellow cards, and rice at ₹6.15 a kilo. The poorest of the poor, covered under the Antyodaya Anna Yojana, were sold rice at ₹3 per kg on the basis of red ration cards. The ration shop owner received a commission of ₹0.35 from the government for every kilo of rice sold.

The Wadhwa committee observed that there was a clear profit incentive for the ration shop owner to divert more grain to white card-holders. The system, as it stood, “diluted the euphemism ‘Targeted’ and made the system virtually universal.” This detracted “from its main focus of catering to the poor and destitute.”

Activists had a different view. Members of the Right to Food campaign  agreed that the leakages were excessive but felt that the system excluded too many potential beneficiaries. If PDS was truly made universal, then there would be no APL category to which ration shops could divert grain.

Those who didn’t need subsidised rations––say, upper-class families in metropolises––would simply self-select out of the system. They wouldn’t want to go to ration stores because shop timings were erratic, and the food grains might be of poorer quality. With such a system, there would no longer be a need to identify a poverty line. ^[19] (Self-selection is a powerful idea and we know it works. It is, in fact, cumbersome to buy food through PDS––just as it’s more inconvenient and uncomfortable to go to government schools and hospitals.) People with more resources, generally from dominant castes and in a position to choose how to use their social capital, universally choose private education and medical services.

In the second term of the Congress-led UPA government, universal coverage was the big debate in the run-up to the food security legislation. “Nobody wanted such a high coverage or for so many people to be covered,” recalled Siraj Hussain, a former Union secretary of agriculture who was then a joint secretary in the Department of Food and Public Distribution. ^[20]

One section of the Congress, reportedly led by then Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, was against the idea of universal coverage, several activists alleged. In August 2013, however, Chidambaram told the press that the government could foot the subsidy without disturbing the budget deficit: the Act would increase expenditure by only 25 percent of the existing figure, which came to 1 percent of the GDP. Economists such as Surjit Bhalla and Ashok Gulati argued that it would be closer to 2 percent to 3 percent of the GDP. (Chidambaram may well have been correct: the food subsidy as a percentage of GDP has declined since the NFSA was passed, though the Comptroller and Auditor General has questioned these numbers.)

One alternative was for the law to cover a specific percentage of the population that needed subsidised rations. Sonia Gandhi, Congress president and chairperson of the National Advisory Council (NAC), supported this idea. Meanwhile, activists such as Jean Drèze, who was a member of the working group for the food law and the Right to Food Campaign coalition, urged the government to make ration system coverage universal.

The NFSA is now eight years old. It has not been a cure-all for India’s vulnerable population. Vast numbers of potential beneficiaries remain excluded. Migrants, who formed 37 percent of India’s population in 2011, can only access the ration system at their permanent address—as Indians who don’t have to worry about their next square meal discovered to their horror in 2020 and 2021. Another year of nutritional vulnerability threatens an entire generation of children.

So how many people should the government’s schemes cover? If guaranteeing nutrition to 67 percent of India’s population hasn’t stopped millions from going hungry, should the target be revised? If the government has to work within existing boundaries, then how can that work more effectively?

There’s little national data available about the extent to which people are able to access the PDS. Based on 2011 census data, the NFSA should have covered 810 million people. This number should have increased to 922 million by 2020, the development economist Reetika Khera and independent researcher Anmol Somanchi argued in a study published last year.

That study aimed to calculate how many people truly had access to the PDS during the 2020 Covid lockdown. According to Khera and Somanchi’s calculations, “with 900 million people getting PDS coverage as per NFSA norms, and 51 million getting less support than NFSA norms from the PDS, over 400 million are left to manage without any food support from the government.” ^[21]

“We don’t know whether the National Food Security Act or biometrics (linked to Aadhaar cards) are working on the ground,” Siraj Hussain told me. One of the reasons for this information gap is that the latest National Sample Survey Organisation’s consumption survey has been withdrawn. C. Rangarajan, chairman of the Economic Advisory Council in the second UPA tenure, explained that economists relied on this NSSO data to determine the proper reach of the PDS. The last time this data was released was in 2011-12. Then, it showed leakages as high as 40 percent.

Another glaring gap in knowledge is on how caste affects access to the PDS, and whether the NFSA has or can even make a dent in that. The entire academic framework of the coverage debate is built firmly around class and the poverty divide. When caste is mentioned, it is often as only one of many factors affecting access to the PDS, such as gender or class. The economist Sukhdeo Thorat told me that this was inevitable given the caste structure of academia. ^[22]

Even so, heated debates unfold in the pages of the Economic and Political Weekly about how the government and its committees measure leakages in the PDS, and whether this means that the state should resort to technology such as cash transfers or Aadhaar linkages to stem these leakages. Yet, most news channels and newspapers cover hunger, vulture-like, only after people have died of it, when public outrage demands it.

Elite urban media, owned and operated mostly by privileged upper castes and aimed at audiences like themselves, rarely cover food policies or shortages. When food does appear in English newspaper supplements, it is as recipes, diets, fitness regimens. Activists may care about the hungry, but popular media doesn’t. Like so many other social brutalities, hunger is always someone else’s problem now.

“The PDS provides security against hunger—it helps people to cope,” Drèze explained. “Hunger is people not having enough to eat, but they need other inputs to thrive.” Essentials such as pulses, millets and oil—part and parcel of a standard Covid-19 emergency kit an NGO might hand out in a city like Mumbai, or that local administrations in a state like Kerala would give a family in quarantine—are left out of the system.

Already, there is evidence to show that direct cash transfers haven’t quite worked out the way they were supposed to. In 2015, the Union government launched a pilot scheme to transfer cash instead of food in the Union territories of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Chandigarh and Puducherry. After a poor response, the Union government quietly decided to make the scheme optional for both states and Union territories. ^[23]

Respondents of the scheme found it increased their travel time. They had to make one trip to the bank to get the money and another to the market to buy grain. Often, they didn’t know when the money had come to their bank accounts. Sometimes, it was unclear which of their bank accounts the government had transferred money to.

The economist Himanshu, who was among those who contributed suggestions for the food security bill, felt that a universal scheme of cash transfers is unlikely to work out in practice. In the current system, the central government guarantees the states’ MSP-based procurement from farmers. Even if a cash transfer system does away with the need for food distribution, states are likely to be politically compelled to continue procuring so as not to lose the support of the influential agricultural community. And states simply cannot afford to stockpile and warehouse that much produce.

Others argue for more fundamental changes. One major change, linking ration cards with Aadhaar cards, is more or less a complete exercise now. This is meant to help target beneficiaries, but it has also resulted in the large-scale deletions of legally eligible individuals from government databases.

Sometimes, the price of these bureaucratic exercises is death. In the April 2020 lockdown, a story emerged from Bihar about rural PDS customers who were pushed to starvation because machines at ration shops did not recognise their Aadhaar-registered fingerprints. A month earlier, the Centre had announced the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, which distributed free grain to ration card holders. But it was pointless if card holders weren’t at their permanent addresses, or unable to register or verify their identity for some reason. ^[24]

It was another of those endless contradictions of the Indian state, always at odds with itself and always a step removed from ground reality. Those are also the conditions under which hunger persists. The trick of the state is to persuade you that the problem is too big to solve.