India, among the world’s largest economies, has more than 200 million people going to bed hungry.

It is among the world’s top food producers; yet, it faces a chronic undernourishment crisis with 16% of its population malnourished compared to the global average of 8%. The dominant capitalist discourse enables the treatment of the symptoms of hunger with excess production, while ignoring the deeper causes of that poor diet.

This series, ‘Made Hungry in India’, traces the structural causes of hunger and food insecurity in inequalities in power. It examines the solutions the State is offering to ask what their true meaning for people and the climate.

New Delhi: Rajkumari Devi frowned and pursed her lips looking at the heap of potatoes in front of her. She had sat cross-legged for the last eight hours on the grey concrete floor surrounded by gunny bags at the potato shed in Azadpur mandi, a wholesale fruit and vegetable market in northern Delhi, and had several hours of work to go. For every 50 kilos of potatoes Devi sorted with her hands as per their size, she earned Rs 15. On a good day, this totaled to Rs 150 or Rs 200, a third of Delhi’s minimum wage of Rs 660 a day. That day had been exceptionally hard: it was her first day back at work after her 26-year-old son, a factory worker, had died after an accidental fall 20 days earlier.

She said her husband, who pushed a cycle cart to ferry vegetables at the mandi, was weak from repeated tuberculosis infections. After their...

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