Food-production and food-supply programmes in India.

This paper outlines brietly the growth of India’s agriculture and, more recently, the role of food-production programmes in that growth, observing the impact of food-production and also of food-supply programmes on the society at large and, especially, on the diets of poorer families. Inevitably, this first part of the paper is largely descriptive; however, in the last one-third of the paper, there is a brief but more analytical consideration of the two most important aspects of food programmes: namely, the criteria by which food programmes can be judged as successful or unsuccessful, and the structural elements in successful programmes which appear to contribute most to their success.