ABSTRACT
This chapter maps some of the major debates exploring the elephant of India's failure to end hunger and malnutrition. One very large body of scholarship and policy conversations focuses on the broad area of what is called food security. Closely related to the food security discourse are discussions around food sovereignty, the body-part of the elephant of India's hunger riddle. The chapter discusses state duties to provision food to people insufficiently able to feed themselves. Critics fear that doles will create dependencies, and diverts attention from the urgent need variously to revive an ecologically sustainable agriculture, or ensure universal sanitation and drinking water. There is little hope for the end of hunger until India's small farm sector is protected and revived; until sustainable technologies are advanced; and above all until the gendered, social and class-based inequalities of one of the most historically unequal societies in the world are at least partly overcome.
