The book under review is a report that narrates a sad tale of poverty amidst plenty,of the poor untouched by the euphoria of growth-oriented development, both objectively and subjectively. Whereas the neoliberal media and academia have marketed acute poverty (sudden shortage of food) to demand intervention and an immediate pumping of money and resources, it has generally ignored chronic poverty, understandably because dealing with it would raise uncomfortable questions. It would require questioning the very logic of development and also its epistemological framework, its concepts and tools of analysis. However, during the late nineties, the atmosphere had already begun to change. Now, with the ongoing financial crisis, nobody finds the market to be a panacea. This book has been published at the right moment when it will find a credible amount of readership.

The first chapter deals with the conceptualisation of poverty and hunger — how these have been variously understood in relevant literature. Through this exercise, it defines also the notions of under-nourishment, hidden hunger, food insecurity, etc. The chapter then discusses how poverty, hunger and food insecurity have been officially understood and quantified. It is noted that the data in India seems to indicate self-sufficiency in food production but, for structural reasons, this apparent over-production is actually under-consumption. “With real agricultural wages declining, and food prices and unemployment rising, there are signs of increasing food insecurity.” In other words, the structural factors limit the accessibility of food that is produced. “Food availability does not necessarily guarantee that people can access the food that is necessary for their well being.”(p. 17)

In order to locate hunger and the hungry in India, Chapter 2 uses the data compiled during the 55th round of National Sample Survey. Using the consumer expenditure survey data, the NSSO reports Orissa to be the poorest state followed by Bihar and Assam. However, there are tremendous heterogeneities in each state (except Bihar). The high poverty regions are mainly thickly populated, semi-arid tribal areas that have been historically neglected. Further, “it is the agricultural labour and casual labour households that report higher cases of not getting enough food.... NSSO data also shows that per-capita consumption expenditure is lowest for the category of SC and ST households.”( p. 34) Interestingly, with regard to district-level deprivation, “states like Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh did not have a single entry in the best 100 districts in the country.”( p. 35)

Chapter 3 reports field-based research with 462 households in nine villages of eight states in India. Ninety-six per cent of these households belong to the most marginalised communities in India (55 per cent being adivasis and 32 per cent being dalits). The study was undertaken to grasp the features that perpetuate chronic hunger. As a matter of fact, the deprivation suffered by the households was multidimensional  social, economic and political. Geographically too, these people were swept into “remote, inaccessible and inhospitable areas.” Fifty-six per cent of the households in the survey are settled in disaster-prone areas.

Moreover, 91.76 per cent of the adivasis and 81.21 per cent of the dalits in the survey earn less than Rs 750 per month. A majority of the surveyed households never went to school and are deprived of any credible health facilities located near their habitation. A large number of the households do not have any access to land and are engaged as wage employees in agricultural or non-agricultural rural employment. Characteristically, only 29.44 per cent of the households had access to some sort of food-support schemes.

A significant lesson that emerges from the survey is regarding migration. “Even though a large number of the sample population suffers from extremely low income and hunger, they might not have the required financial resources and social contacts in destination areas to migrate.” (p. 75) Hence, only 13.2 per cent of the surveyed households migrated for work. However, the researchers could have tried probing into other sociological and ethnographic reasons behind non-migration. Rural-to-Urban migration, especially from tribal and remote rural communities, is not simply an individual choice; there are sociological reasons too.

In the final chapter, the main findings and observations are enumerated.

Implicit in the analysis presented in the book is a critique of the growth-oriented development that the Indian state and the ruling classes have followed. However, it would have been helpful if the authors had included a chapter critiquing the various poverty-alleviation programmes. That could have sharpened the conclusions, some of which still seem to be tentatively posed in the book. On the whole, the book is able to demonstrate the structurally entrenched character of poverty and hunger in late capitalist countries such as India, where the society is multi-layered and there are islands of prosperity surrounded by immense poverty.