Food Governance in India

This book offers insights into the issues around food security, public health, equity and global governance. With a focus on India, it highlights the complex networks of sociopolitical, economic and agricultural challenges to ensure self-sufficiency in food production.

Based on field research conducted across India and an in-depth study on government agencies and multilateral fora, this book connects and juxtaposes global, national and local narratives on food security and policy. It analyses issues ranging from climate change to gaps in the nation-wide public food distribution systems. Through interdisciplinary narratives on food insecurity and poverty, the book exposes the underlying problems within policy frameworks and offers solutions for greater accessibility and distribution of food supplies while combating climate variability and agrarian distress.

The volume explores global food governance norms and India’s role in further shaping them. It will be of interest to students and researchers of public policy and governance, development studies, sociology, agriculture studies, public health and nutrition and economics.

Anjoo Sharan Upadhyaya has served as a professor of political science at Banaras Hindu University since 1997. Her research interests are women and peace, human security, digital technologies and governance. She has edited several books, including Nepal in Transition to Democracy (2013), is the coeditor of the biannual journal, Peace Works and is the co-author of Peace and Conflict Resolution in the Twenty-first Century (forthcoming).

Åshild Kolås is a social anthropologist and research professor at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). Her core areas of expertise are governance, identity politics and peacebuilding. She is the editor of several anthologies, including Women, Peace and Security in Myanmar: Between Feminism and Ethnopolitics (2019) and Sovereignty Revisited: The Basque Case (2017, co-edited with Pedro Ibarra Güell).

Ruchita Beri is a senior research associate and centre coordinator for the Africa, Latin America, Caribbean and United Nations Centre at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA), New Delhi. She has edited several books including India and Africa: Common Security Challenges for the Next Decade (2016).