Death by Hunger

To the House of Commons India Secretary Leopold Stennett Amery, redundant master of officialese, declared last week: "There is no famine [in India] and no widespread prevalence of acute shortage."

In Nasik, near Bombay, angry mobs seized grain; police and soldiers were ordered to shoot without warning. At Jhansi a man was trampled to death by a crowd trying to buy grain. In New Delhi India's Food Minister N. R. Sarker said that supplies would be procured from inside and outside the country by Government agencies which would have control over purchase and distribution. Government price ceilings on wheat would be removed to "restore confidence," i.e., make it profitable for hoarders to sell.

A wheat price-control act was passed in December 1941 despite wails from Punjab landlords who raise almost half of India's wheat and have been hoarding it. Last week the controlled wheat price was five to six rupees per maund (82.28 lb.), while the black-market price was 14 to 17 rupees. The result: grain prices have risen above the reach of the poorer classes; rising prices have forced the Government to print new money at the rate of about 70 million rupees per week, more than tripling the paper currency in circulation before the outbreak of war.

Never able to feed its 388,800,000 people in peacetime, India during World War II no longer can count on the twelve million tons of rice formerly imported (1937-38) from Burma, Thailand and Indo-China. Almost two million Indian soldiers are eating more than ever before; half a million Burmese and Malayan refugees have to be fed, as do American and Chinese troops.

India has also exported food and rolling stock to the Middle East to aid Allied forces and to help transport Lend-Lease shipments to Russia. As a result the Indian railroads are underequipped for food distribution and further handicapped by the conversion of many railroad shops to war production. War has caused a shortage of bottoms for coastwise food shipment.

Having sidestepped for three years such logical solutions of India's food problem as rationing, the British Raj was failing to apprehend and punish large hoarders. Yet last week, on the 13th anniversary of a declaration of Indian independence still unrealized, the Raj arrested some 200 demonstrators, while Mohandas Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, framer and proclaimer respectively of the declaration, remained in custody.

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