These periodic brushes with shortage mean suffering, but they have their positive side as well. Chiefly, they are great spurs to the development of politico-economic consciousness. Amartya Sen was drawn to the study of economics by the emiseration that he saw as a child in 1943, the year of the Bengal Famine. Leave aside Nobel Prize winners, occasional privation makes the average Indian much more politically aware than citizens of more developed nations. Onions become prohibitively expensive, but the price of mushrooms remains the same. Price and supply fluctuations hit only essential items, never luxury goods -- even an illiterate labourer knows that.

Another lesson the average Indian has learned over the past 50 years is that it is within human power to prevent shortages. Harvests are no more predictable today than they were a century ago, but the phenomenon of widespread starvation deaths as a consequence of a bad year doesn't happen any more. Thank better communication/transporation, planning and inter-region coordination for that. But in one other famine-blunting measure India still lags behind and that is the food-processing industry. Solve the perish-ability problem and you create a time-cushion that smooths out the peaks and troughs of good seasons and bad. Food processing is still in its infancy here; which means that the market remains largely a commodity market and not a product market.

However, processing cannot solve the problem of profiteering. India has done nothing to regulate the conduct of the retail market. When there is an active demand in the market, the benefits of the higher prices the consumer pays are almost completely absorbed by the retailers and these demand-pressures are not fully conveyed backward to the producer. In the situation of higher production and larger supplies, the market does not ease for the consumer. The retail market remains a black box: transactions within it may be invisible but the smell of manipulation wafts for miles. As the common man knows only too well, profiteers and politicians need each other; one cannot spin money without the other. Straightening out the system out won't be easy but we should not feel that it is impossible. "Impossible" is what people would have said 50 years ago about eliminating famine.