ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the grain storage silo in post-independence India as an indexical object in a discourse of nation-building, in the battle to combat food insecurity while also shoring up governmental legitimacy from the periodic market crises and inflationary pressures created by fluctuations in agricultural output. The study of the silo thus locates it as a vehicle not so much of space but of time, as housing a “stage” in a process involving inflationary management; domestic subsidization and support for farmers and consumers; and international flows of technology, commodities, and aid, crosshatched by the intersecting challenges of market and state. In a situation where food security appeared as a major arbiter of sovereignty, the grain silo and grain storage in general, devised as part of a government effort to retain (and represent) surpluses, acted as an intersectional object, necessarily challenged by limitations in other sectors, from the availability of land and technology to the paucity of expertise in devising an imported typology. The chapter concludes that understanding development as a substitutive process underscores the aporia of developmental metapolitics in which structural change was promised but always delayed. Eventually, the incremental change offered by a regime of substitution transitioned to one of flexibility that defined a liberalized regime of food management and accumulation.
