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About 20 percent of India’s rice crop goes into the Food Corporation of India, which distributes the staple grain to the poor at subsidized prices. Punjab was the focal point of the Green Revolution in India, in which the introduction of high-yielding seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and subsidized irrigation turned the nation from a grain importer to a grain exporter in the 1970s. Yet despite bumper crops, India remains one of the hungriest nations in the world, with more than 220 million people undernourished and half of reproductive-aged women anemic. Poverty is the primary culprit. Every harvest season, poor families from the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh flock to grain markets like this one in Jandiala, where the men work as day laborers moving and winnowing rice, while women, children, and the elderly scavenge chaff piles for grains left behind.

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About 20 percent of India’s rice crop goes into the Food Corporation of India, which distributes the staple grain to the poor at subsidized prices. Punjab was the focal point of the Green Revolution in India, in which the introduction of high-yielding seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and subsidized irrigation turned the nation from a grain importer to a grain exporter in the 1970s. Yet despite bumper crops, India remains one of the hungriest nations in the world, with more than 220 million people undernourished and half of reproductive-aged women anemic. Poverty is the primary culprit. Every harvest season, poor families from the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh flock to grain markets like this one in Jandiala, where the men work as day laborers moving and winnowing rice, while women, children, and the elderly scavenge chaff piles for grains left behind.

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