Agrarian crisis in India

Abstract

Bihar, in the northeast of India, is one of the largest (population 56.4 million), most overcrowded and impoverished states of that country. The famine of 1966-67 which centered on Bihar and resulted in 60 million people fed for two years entirely on U.S. food, was one of the events which stimulated an awareness in the late 1960s of the developing food problems of Third World countries. The food riots which spread through the cities and small towns of Bihar in March and April of 1974 made it one of the spark points of turmoil in a year of turmoil for India, and a recent smallpox epidemic (30,000 deaths as of early June) was only another aspect of the crisis of malnutrition and disease. In many ways, just as India itself is one of the focal points of a developing world-wide crisis in agricultural productivity and impending famine, Bihar is a focal point within India.