UPPSC 2025 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 129 of 150

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).

• (a)1 and 2 — 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)3 and 4 — 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)Only 1 — 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.

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.

Two things settle this item quickly. First, read the operative word: the question does not ask who contributed to food security, it asks who introduced the concept of entitlements, which is a specific piece of economic theory with a specific author. Second, notice the architecture of the options. Only two of the four listed persons are names a serious candidate will recognise, and the code offers you a choice between them, a pairing of them with an unknown, or a pairing of unknowns. When a name means nothing to you in a question about a landmark idea, treat that as evidence about the option rather than a gap in your reading — landmark ideas are not attributed to obscure figures. That leaves the real decision, Swaminathan against Sen, and it is decided by the availability-versus-access distinction: Swaminathan is the architect of India's food production, Sen the theorist of who gets to eat it.

• Amartya Sen set out the entitlement approach in Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), arguing that famines can occur without any decline in the aggregate availability of food
• An entitlement is what a person can lawfully command — their endowment of labour and assets converted through wages, employment and prices; starvation is an entitlement failure, not necessarily a supply failure
• Sen's evidence included the Bengal famine of 1943, in which food output was not exceptionally low but wartime inflation and speculation destroyed the purchasing power of rural labourers
• The FAO and 1996 World Food Summit definition follows the same logic: food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic ACCESS to sufficient, safe and nutritious food — the four pillars being availability, access, utilisation and stability
• Sen received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his contributions to welfare economics, and the Bharat Ratna in 1999
• India's National Food Security Act, 2013 is the entitlement idea in statute: it converts subsidised grain from a scheme into a legal right, covering up to 75 per cent of the rural and 50 per cent of the urban population, sitting on top of a food-surplus economy

• Marking Swaminathan because the question mentions food security. He is the architect of India's food availability; the entitlement concept, which is about access, is Sen's
• Pairing the right name with an unfamiliar one. The entitlement approach has one author and one founding text, so any option offering two originators is wrong before you even recognise the second name
• Reading 'entitlement' in its everyday administrative sense — a ration quota or a scheme benefit — instead of its technical sense as the bundle a person can command through endowments and exchange

UPPSC likes to attach a landmark idea to its author and then surround the real name with invented ones, so the question is decided by recognition rather than by argument — the same technique it uses for indices, reports and committees. UPSC almost never asks who coined a term; it tests the idea instead, by asking what the National Food Security Act actually guarantees or what the Global Hunger Index actually measures, which is why the concept and the statute must be learnt together.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The central argument of Amartya Sen's entitlement approach to famine is that

  • (a)famines occur only when total food output in a country falls sharply
  • (b)famines can occur without any decline in the aggregate availability of food, when groups lose their command over it
  • (c)famines are caused chiefly by the failure of international food aid to arrive in time
  • (d)famines are a consequence of population growth outrunning food supply

  Answer(b) famines can occur without any decline in the aggregate availability of food, when groups lose their command over it — Sen's Poverty and Famines (1981), argued from the Bengal famine of 1943 among other cases.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following best describes the shift in food-security thinking brought about by the entitlement approach?

  • (a)From access to availability
  • (b)From availability to access
  • (c)From nutrition to calorie counting
  • (d)From domestic production to food imports

  Answer(b) From availability to access — the question is no longer how much food exists in the country but whether particular households can command it, which is why food security is defined in terms of physical and economic access.