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Comment by seltzered_ | Hacker News Reader

"and saved Indians from starving to death with 340 million metric tons of food aid"

No, theres more complexity to the story. Do some research on what caused famine in India and how there's more questions around Churchill and WW2 influences.

Start with https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/29/asia/churchill-bengal-fam... (Churchill’s policies to blame for millions of Indian famine deaths, study says) , which IIRC references https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018... (Drought and Famine in India, 1870–2016)

Also watch the documentary "Bengal Tigers": https://youtube.com/watch?v=T31MFNLJKJw

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Churchill's famine is a different story altogether from the famines stated in the article though. Churchill's famines were directly a result of food exports to the rest of the Commonwealth while India starved. On the contrary, these famines mentioned in the article were often the usual in India at the time. While the Northern plains are very fertile, there is also a strong "luck" element that depends on the timing of rains and the monsoon season. Getting them wrong was often the reason for a large number of famines across the country. The southern part of India is largely mountain plateau and jungle and agriculturally poor, hence they often relied on imports from the north.

What really changed the equation for India was the Green Revolution, which happened because the first PM, Jawaharlal Nehru (a figure the current govt loves to denigrate and pin all their faults on), invited Norman Borlaug to replicate his Mexican success story for India.

Consider reading critiques of the Green Revolution, such as 'The Globalization of Wheat' https://upittpress.org/books/9780822947349/

I would say M.S. Swaminathan as the father of Green revolution in India.

MS Swaminathan worked and learnt under Borlaug. I'd like to think of them as hammer and anvil - Swaminathan is the hammer who worked out the implementation on the village level, but without Borlaug the anvil present to provide the technology, would have had his hands tied.

The CNN article references the Bengal famine of 1943, specifically prioritizing food delivery to military personnel during WW2. The Food for Peace Act of came into effect in 1954.

Fair point, but I wonder how much that event led to international support that mightve been well intentioned but also with potential issues, thinking more in the context of the Green Revolution (Norman borlaug documentary https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/man-who-tr... ) and critiques of it ( see 'The Globalization of Wheat' https://upittpress.org/books/9780822947349/ )

Yes, the British starved millions to death. What does that have to do with an American program?

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