Barkha Dutt: evaluation

Transcript context

…As you know, there are plenty of reports of food aid, say, rotting on the sides of the highways, not being delivered in time. Yet, what’s also striking about most regional varieties of Indian food is just how extraordinary the vegetables are. How does that common picture fit together? There’s a major infrastructure problem with food transport, yet arguably, you have the best, tastiest vegetables in the entire world. How can that be? It can be because it’s our coal train supply lines where the weaknesses are. There are weaknesses in our infrastructure, which is why you see in this country, where people still go hungry, that there are godowns full. Food Corporation of India, which is the government-run manager, as it were, of grains in the country — every year, you’ll see these pictures coming out of India which will show you a mountain of underutilized wheat that has rotted. There is a surplus, and there is an underutilized amount. It is rotted. There are two problems. I’m not an economist. You are, so you may have a view on this. There are two problems here. One is, of course, in the supply chains, the efficiency of the transport system. The other is that governments still buy or procure grains at what’s called a minimum support price. This was the context for a recent year-long, unprecedented protest by farmers of North India on the outskirts of India’s capital, one that got global attention because the Modi government moved to reform, or that was the word they used, and allow private players to come into this market. I don’t know enough to say what is better and what is worse. There has been the suggestion that this minimum support price system has created a mismatch between demand and supply, that there have to be more efficient ways of treating agricultural markets. I’ve read and heard all the arguments. I’m not an expert, I’m not an economist, but I do know that there is often this glut of grain in a country where so many millions are still poor. Therefore, there is obviously something structurally wrong. That doesn’t contradict the fact that there is plentiful variety of vegetables. It is just whether those vegetables actually manage to reach the markets in such a way that is a fair price for the farmer. Let’s say you had to pick a single Indian city or region to eat from for the rest of your life. Probably it wouldn’t be Delhi, but what would it be?…

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