Who among the following introduced the concept of entitlements in food security ?
1. M. S. Swaminathan
2. Atul Pranay
3. Samali Srikant
4. Amartya Sen
Select the correct answer from the code given bel

Question

Who among the following introduced the concept of entitlements in food security ?
1. M. S. Swaminathan
2. Atul Pranay
3. Samali Srikant
4. Amartya Sen
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Only 4, Amartya Sen. The entitlement approach to hunger is Sen's, and it is set out in Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, published in 1981. Its argument overturned the assumption on which famine policy had rested. Until then a famine was explained by a food availability decline — the crops failed, so people starved. Sen showed that famines can and do occur with no collapse at all in the aggregate supply of food, because what determines whether a household eats is not how much grain exists in the country but what that household can lawfully command. He called that command an entitlement: the set of commodity bundles a person can obtain from their endowment — their labour power, land, animals, assets — through the exchange conditions they face, which means wages, employment, prices, the terms of trade for what they sell, and whatever the state provides. A landless labourer who loses work, or whose wage buys half as much rice as it did last month because prices have raced ahead, suffers an entitlement failure and starves in a district where grain is piled in the market. Sen's own case studies included the Bengal famine of 1943, where the food available was not exceptionally low but wartime inflation and speculation destroyed the purchasing power of rural labourers. The idea reframed food security around access rather than availability, and it is the reason the standard definition speaks of physical and economic access, and the reason India's own answer to hunger is a rights-based statute rather than a production target. Sen was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his work in welfare economics, of which this famine research is a central part; he received the Bharat Ratna in 1999. Only item 4 belongs in the answer, which is option (c).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) It leaves out the one correct name entirely. M. S. Swaminathan's towering contribution to Indian food security is real but it lies on the other side of the availability-access divide: he was the plant geneticist who, with Norman Borlaug, drove the Green Revolution that lifted India's wheat and rice output, the first World Food Prize laureate in 1987, and the chairman of the National Commission on Farmers. Raising what the country grows is not the same as explaining who can obtain it, and the entitlement framework is precisely an argument that the first does not guarantee the second. The other name in this option has no standing in the entitlement literature.  (b) It has found Sen, which is most of the work, and then spoiled the answer by pairing him with a second name. The entitlement approach has a single author and a single founding text — Sen's Poverty and Famines of 1981 — so any option that couples him with a co-originator is wrong on its face. The name at item 3 is not associated with the entitlement approach in the food-security literature. When a question asks who introduced a concept and one name is unmistakable while another is unfamiliar, the unfamiliar name is far more often filler than a forgotten scholar.  (d) The designed trap, and the one that catches most candidates. M. S. Swaminathan is the name Indian students attach to food security by reflex, and the question is written to convert that reflex into a wrong mark. But the stem asks specifically about the concept of entitlements, a term of art in welfare economics, not about who fed India. Swaminathan's work made the grain exist; Sen's work explained why its existence is not enough.

Concept: Food security has four conventional pillars — availability, access, utilisation and stability — and the entitlement approach is what put the second of them at the centre. An entitlement, in Sen's usage, is the bundle of goods a person can legitimately acquire, given what they own or can do (their endowment) and the terms on which they can convert that into food (exchange entitlement: wages, employment, prices, relative terms of trade, plus transfers from the state). Starvation, in this framework, is an entitlement failure, and it can strike one occupational group — landless labourers, fishermen, barbers, transport workers — while the national granary is full and other groups are unaffected. That is why the 1996 World Food Summit definition insists that food security exists only when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food.

State PCS 2025 Q129 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q129 — Economy PYQ with Answer