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15 - Rights as Logistics

Notes on the Right to Food and Food Retail Liberalization in India

from Part V - Economic and Social Rights in Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2019

Katharine G. Young
Affiliation:
Boston College, Massachusetts
Amartya Sen
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
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Summary

This chapter demonstrates how the tools of law and political economy bring to bear new challenges in the growing use of economic and social rights. In 2013, the government of India enacted new food security legislation. The Right to Food Act aims to provide impoverished consumers with adequate food grains at a reasonable price, expanding a long-standing Indian subsidy program in the language of human rights. This new right to food is widely hailed by activists and policy makers, but largely coincided with the entry of large multinational retail chains in the food retail market, potentially catalyzing significant shifts in food distribution. This chapter examines India’s new right to food, then, to unpack larger debates about the structure of the food economy in India, including by unpacking a complex interplay of conflicts and interests among producers and consumers, rural and urban citizens, small and large capital. The industrialization and consolidation of production and distribution systems finds justification simultaneously in the language of large-scale efficiency and market liberalization as well as in the language of accountability in economic and social rights.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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