The widespread deaths due to starvation and epidemics are the characteristics of

Correct — A, famine. A famine is a catastrophic failure of access to food across a region, sharp enough that people die of starvation and of the diseases that follow malnutrition — cholera, dysentery, typhus and measles have historically killed more famine victims than hunger itself. Its defining features are exactly the two the stem names: widespread deaths and accompanying epidemics, concentrated in time and place. The other three options describe conditions that can be severe without producing that outcome. Modern practice defines a famine formally, and the international classification declares one only when starvation deaths, extreme food gaps and acute malnutrition all cross fixed thresholds together.

• (b)poverty — A chronic condition of inadequate income and consumption. Poverty raises the risk of famine and shapes who dies in one, but it is persistent rather than catastrophic, and the great majority of poor populations never experience a famine.
• (c)civil war — A cause rather than the phenomenon itself. Conflict has triggered most recent famines by blocking markets, displacing farmers and obstructing relief, but the deaths described in the stem are the famine, not the fighting.
• (d)malnutrition — A deficiency of nutrients that may be chronic and widespread without mass death. Stunting and wasting are measures of malnutrition, and a country can carry a heavy malnutrition burden for decades with no famine at all.

Famine analysis was reshaped by Amartya Sen's work on entitlements, which showed that famines can occur without any fall in the total food available. What collapses is a group's ability to command food — through wages, crops grown, trade or transfers — so a wage labourer can starve in a district where grain is being exported. That is why relief has moved toward employment and cash transfers rather than food movement alone.

India's colonial history is the clearest illustration, from the Bengal famine of 1770 through the failures of the 1870s and 1890s that produced the Famine Commissions and the Famine Codes, to the Bengal famine of 1943 in which around three million people died while grain moved out of the province. Independent India has had severe droughts, in Bihar in 1966-67 and Maharashtra in 1972-73, without famine on that scale — a difference usually credited to public employment, buffer stocks and a free press. The right to food is now anchored in the National Food Security Act, 2013.

• Famine means widespread starvation deaths and the epidemics that follow, concentrated in a region and a period.
• Epidemic disease, not hunger alone, has killed most famine victims historically.
• Amartya Sen's entitlement approach explains famines as a collapse of access rather than of total supply.
• The Bengal famine of 1943 killed around three million people.
• Poverty and malnutrition are chronic conditions; famine is an acute crisis.

• Treating famine as simply an extreme form of poverty; the mechanisms differ.
• Assuming a famine requires an absolute shortage of food in the region.
• Confusing malnutrition indicators with famine thresholds.

A definition item that rewards attention to the two markers in the stem — deaths on a large scale, and epidemics.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The entitlement approach to famine, which holds that famines can occur without a fall in food availability, is associated with

  • (a)Gunnar Myrdal
  • (b)Amartya Sen
  • (c)W. Arthur Lewis
  • (d)Simon Kuznets

  Answer(b) Amartya Sen — whose study of the Bengal famine of 1943 developed the argument.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The National Food Security Act was enacted in

  • (a)2005
  • (b)2009
  • (c)2013
  • (d)2016

  Answer(c) 2013 — giving statutory entitlement to subsidised foodgrain.