The lack of respect for books in India is ridiculous. Very few use libraries, and forget temperature/humidity control: most feel no shame in mishandling books they borrow. The availability and care shown to books, new and old, in the US is very commendable.
Our prime minister and most citizens love to brag about "ancient culture" and "proud history", but preservation of our own history and public record was and is done much better by the British and Americans. It's truly nauseating.
EliRivers 17 days ago [-]
I sometimes wonder if feeling good about "ancient culture" and "proud history" creates an attitude that there's no need (or no point) to add to any of that in the present. For how long can a people use the achievements of those who died a thousand years previously as a crutch to not to live up to those achievements.
lupire 17 days ago [-]
It's a bit reversed. The history doesn't make people lazy, but lazy people rationalize their laziness by claiming clout from history.
Peoples who achieved more than their ancestors have less history to be prideful of, since they are proud of their present.
dustypotato 17 days ago [-]
Kinda tracks. India, Italy, Greece, pride themselves on culture and lacks in development compared to peers. US, China (after cultural revolution), Germany don't and are top among their peers.
hnfong 17 days ago [-]
I'd dispute the claim on China, at least for today's China. Anecdotally, the Chinese are very conscious of their/our "ancient culture" and "proud history".
`Xi said that the Chinese Dream is the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation"`
If more literally translated, this is pretty much the Chinese version of "Making China Great Again".
You're probably correct that this doesn't apply during the cultural revolution (and maybe for the most of the 20th century), but that's like a long gone boomer era.
FullGarden_S 17 days ago [-]
>Our prime minister and most citizens love to brag about "ancient culture" and "proud history"
Yes. I think so too.
The bragging is mostly patriotism and it wouldn't be a wonder if the same patriotism made them wish they could erase or forget their own embarrassing past two centuries of history. Most of the historic records before that point were totally destroyed or lost so feeling proud of what's left and moving on is not bad but seriously not prioritizing preservation is really ignorant.
fakedang 17 days ago [-]
> Most of the historic records before that point were totally destroyed or lost so feeling proud of what's left and moving on is not bad but seriously not prioritizing preservation is really ignorant.
It's actually cultural. Even foreign historians from a thousand years back such as Al Biruni criticized the Indian cultural norms of focusing on oral traditions, instead of written text, and the use of assumptions, story telling and exaggerations instead of facts and accurate retelling, which in turn feeds into a culture that prioritized fantasy over curiosity. It's stunning to say how we can obtain accurate records of the locations of the homes destroyed in the Great Fire of London in the 16th century, but don't have an accurate account of many kings in the Indian subcontinent during the 19th century.
This could have been a direct result of the caste system, wherein the deep study of literature was only allowed for Brahmins - not even the kings and nobility.
rayiner 17 days ago [-]
What's wild to me is how British/British Americans can trace their families based on detailed records kept by random villages going back to the Middle Ages. Meanwhile my dad's legal birthday is off by six months because his village in Bangladesh didn't issue a birth certificate until he was five (in the mid 1950s) and then kind of just guessed.
anon291 17 days ago [-]
That's a Christian thing, isn't it? Baptismal certificates are very important.
anui293 17 days ago [-]
This could have been a direct result of the caste system, wherein the deep study of literature was only allowed for Brahmins - not even the kings and nobility. The sentence itself shows the why the oral tradition failed to capture accurate records. From "The beautiful tree" by dharampal -> "in which it had been assumed that education of any sort in India, till very recent decades, was mostly limited to the twice-born amongst the Hindus, and amongst the Muslims to those from the ruling elite.
The actual situation which is revealed was different, if not quite contrary, for at least amongst the Hindus. It was the groups termed Shudras, and the castes considered below them who predominated in the thousands of the then still-existing schools in practically each of these areas."
tempytempytemp 17 days ago [-]
My comment isn't exactly about embarrassing pasts or patriotism. There is lack of basic understanding about preserving data, records and books properly; not just the "how", but also the "why". Just go to any college in the country and see how librarians and students deal with the books they hold, and compare it to how colleges in the US/Europe do the same. The difference is night and day. This can be any type of book; doesn't matter if it's history or math.
Treat a book properly, and thousands of people across future decades will be able to peruse it. Treat it like garbage, and that knowledge won't be available in the future. It's the same with digitization. You need a plan to keep all the books you digitize, or else it's in danger of getting lost if the government/responsible person gets defunded/deprioritized.
All talk about "glorious history of culture and science" is hollow if you cannot store proof of it properly.
anon291 17 days ago [-]
> their own embarrassing past two centuries of history.
I think part of the problem is exactly this. We don't say Spain should be embarrassed at the Muslim conquest, yet we're expected to say India should be 'ashamed' (for what?) for their past two centuries? History just is... We should stop assigning emotional value to it.
The issue here is twofold. Firstly, India is not unique in this pursuit. China also has taken charge of constructing its own history, and sometimes it's at odds with Western thinking. Often time, the oral / traditional accounts are found to be true.
Secondly, the West also falls into magical thinking. For example, right here, you are parroting the idea that Indian heterodoxy over their own history is misguided. However, it has a clear historical basis in the fact that Britain tried to expropriate most of its history. I don't mean taking various artifacts.
I mean that, for many years, Western historians pushed the idea that the Indus Valley Civilization inhabitants were not related to modern Indians. They couldn't deal with the fact that Indians may have had one of the oldest, largest, and richest ancient civilizations. Of course history has proved them wrong.... Harappan genes are well represented in the Indian subcontinent.
So, sure, we can make all kinds of claims about Indian historians inflating their own history (I would agree), but to then say that Western historians don't is just wrong... Remember, Nazi Germany's racial policy is the direct result of a ridiculously flawed and fantastical understanding of Indian history by Western historians. Like it or not, the Nazis were western too (and besides, plenty of non-German historians agreed with them... we just like to forget about that).
Finally, we cannot ignore the impact of Nazism here. Even today, it is difficult to talk about Aryans without conjuring up images of genocidal Germans. Research has to be qualified and disclaimed so that people don't take the objective historical record and try to justify more atrocities.
For example, going back to the IVC. European historians were insistent that the Aryans civilized India, and many insisted that the IVC was Aryan, and not really 'Indian'. Again, the evidence is very clear that the Harappans have no steppe ancestry. But again, we have an example of the very sort of behavior you accuse india of, except by British historians.
FullGarden_S 14 days ago [-]
>India is not unique in this pursuit. China also has taken charge
No? India is unique in this pursuit because China didn't take as big of an hit as India did. The fact that The Vedas were preserved till now is well enough proof that oral accounts were not useless.
I'm an Indian. I myself can't trace my ancestry past my great grandfather lol(similar to most of the current native black Americans living in the USA) because no records were maintained as that was how insignificant avg. Indian life in India was viewed as back then, thanks to great philanthropists like Mr. Winston Churchill(not like I care). I don't think I can get through to the other comment that started out with the "c-word" and pointed out about castes and oral accounts but lineage of nobles and kings were well maintained by Brahmins and after a rough 2 centuries, very little was left to back up such claims of proper record maintenance so there's no point in fretting over it. Thanks sharing about Nazism, that's news to me.
After seeing people around me, I started to believe that Indians have an inferiority complex engraved into them due to the colonialism and they don't value books or their own history because they don't value themselves in the first place, which was the context behind my previous comment. I think it resulted as a side effect due to the helplessness they felt after what they lost, namely their heritage and their identity along with it. All this makes it seem like their inferiority complex is not going away anytime soon. Gotta see.
screye 17 days ago [-]
Huh, that doesn't compute.
I've known Indians to treat books with respect. It's ingrained in the culture. Books can't be on the floor or touched with a foot. Kids spend days learning how to create books sleeves with brown crafts. Texybooks are well treated due to hand-me-down culture. Vidya (books) is specifically worshipped online home idol-houses. Pirated books or fake photo copies get mistreated, but mostly because they're printed on low budget paper backs. The state of libraries is bad, but so is the state of all infrastructure generally.
In the US, I have yet to see individuals take extraordinary care of books. Yes, textbooks worth $100+ are well treated, but anything that expensive is well treated. (I still have an old HC Verma copy). Libraries are exemplary, but the budgets are incomparable.
I will agree on the sorry state of Indian liberal arts including museums and libraries. The education, quality of scholarship and resulting professionals are subpar compared to the western world. India has excellent STEM and Medical education. The rest have a long way to go.
chengiz 17 days ago [-]
You're right about the respect part, but it does in fact compute. We (I'm Indian) treat books with respect, but we have no preservation ethic beyond treating them with respect. An old book is in our home until it disintegrates or termites get it. But beyond that, shrug. Humidity control etc, what's that. This is of course partly because India is a poor country, and partly because of corrupt government, but it's also because of the fatalism - we simply do not care about the past as is the norm in the West. You know how even a tinpot town's history is available in the local library in the US? Beyond rarefied academia and the odd hobbyist, India just does not have that culture.
anon291 17 days ago [-]
An interest is antiquity is a characteristic of the Rennaisance in Europe. India has not really gotten there, although interest is growing it seems.
tempytempytemp 16 days ago [-]
In my experience, the worship part is purely theatrical, and is largely the reason stuff like this happens. I'd rather have books treated well for practical purposes than because "Vidya is God" - it makes more sense this way, and you aren't bound to a holy/unreachable ideal.
Feet don't have any use for books, so that doesn't matter much. Book sleeves and brown crafts are because of school rules, else those don't happen. Anyway, you should see how the books within those brown sleeves get by end of school year. Books get handed down in good shape only when a parent is unusually strict about those books (mine were, which is why I have a chip on my shoulder regarding this topic) or if the kid is conscientious. Woe betide you if you loan a book to a random friend; there are good chances it won't come back whole because of the "why-should-I-care-I-don't-own-it" mentality.
Part of it, as you imply, is the cheaper price, and thus quality and binding of the books made in India.
anui293 17 days ago [-]
I don't how many are interested in preserving or knowing about indian history. Some of them might open up skeletons which might make some sections uncomfortable. Its like let bygones be bygones.
navigate8310 17 days ago [-]
I've always argued that antiquated books, sculptures and paintings should not be repatriated back to India due to lack of preservation ecosystem and culture. Just look at the historic sites (barring a very few popular ones), they are either literally pissed on upon or become a poster board for election campaigns.
readthenotes1 17 days ago [-]
There was an ancient temple near Mysore to which a metal plaque was attached, with corresponding rust stains.
It explains in some swirly script language, execpt for "5Rs", that there is a fine for defacing the building (I had it translated).
selimthegrim 17 days ago [-]
A 5 rupee fine was a big deal back in the Raj
rafram 17 days ago [-]
Antique manuscripts were (as the article says!) explicitly not part of this program due to Indian antiquities laws. Big [citation needed] for pretty much all of that, but it isn’t even relevant to the article being discussed.
travisjungroth 17 days ago [-]
It’s entirely relevant. The last paragraph of the article makes the same claim about the state of the libraries.
From another part:
> Mr Michelson-Ambelang told the BBC that the removal of books from South Asia through programmes like PL-480 "creates knowledge gaps", as researchers from there often need to travel to the West to access these resources.
The knowledge gap is that America has the books and India doesn’t. If the books had stayed in India, I think that would have closed the knowledge gap because nobody would have them. They would have been lost just like the other copies of the books.
rafram 17 days ago [-]
Again, this article has absolutely nothing to do with antiquities.
travisjungroth 17 days ago [-]
They said “antiquated books”. Wikipedia suggests that’s more than 100 years old. The program is more than 60 years old. I’m sure some of the million-plus books that were sent over are antiquated by now, if they weren’t already. The restriction was only on manuscripts.
anon291 17 days ago [-]
I've done no research in this, but if this were true, why are there orders of magnitude more Sanskrit manuscripts than any other ancient language?
99_00 17 days ago [-]
Because it was memorized.
Hot and humid climates result in (historically)rapid decay of plant and animal based writing surfaces
anon291 17 days ago [-]
No that doesn't make sense. What would memorization have to do with millenia old preserved manuscripts?
Were the Vedas et al memorized before being written down? Yes, of course. However, regular discoveries are made of ancient manuscripts in various Buddhist temples.
99_00 16 days ago [-]
What doesn’t make sense? That humidity affects the likelihood that an ancient text will be preserved?
Humidity doesn’t guarantee that something will rot. It makes it more likely.
The item will need to be protected from the natural environment. Or stored in a location that is an exception to the general climate.
Compare that to the Middle East. Where the natural climate assists in preservation.
17 days ago [-]
einszwei 17 days ago [-]
I have always argued that homeless people shouldn't be allowed to own anything because of a lack of individual responsibility.
(I could list many similar paternalistic takes)
sudhirc 17 days ago [-]
Before posting this have you checked the state of preservation [0] in the West? The real issue IMHO that if stolen good are returned to their rightful owners, Museums will be empty and libraries will be half empty.
Books are printed in quantities of more than one. I concede a fair amount of material might be the last copy extant, but isn't there an element of post-hoc rationalisation this impoverished stocks of Indian books?
RobRivera 17 days ago [-]
I don't see any claims of negative ramifications being made
ggm 17 days ago [-]
>Todd Michelson-Ambelang, librarian for South Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, wonders if vast collections from the region in US and other Western libraries took away literary resources from the Indian sub-continent.
and
>Mr Michelson-Ambelang told the BBC that the removal of books from South Asia through programmes like PL-480 "creates knowledge gaps", as researchers from there often need to travel to the West to access these resources.
and
> It is unclear whether all the books acquired by US universities from India at that time are still available there. According to Maya Dodd, of India's FLAME University, many books now unavailable in India can be found in the University of Chicago's library collections, all marked with the stamp saying "PL-480".
Although a charitable reading is they aren't available because of decay.
sandy_coyote 17 days ago [-]
[flagged]
RobRivera 17 days ago [-]
I swear if this begins to be a form of ad hominum attack on the interwebs I am going to table flip
ggm 17 days ago [-]
I'm used to it. Those flinging the accusations probably need to be reminded false positive rates in essay gpt detector systems are above 40%
Beep beep boop boop this wasn't written by an LLM.
Izkata 17 days ago [-]
Title is missing a "How" at the beginning. Without that it doesn't make any sense - I was wondering why people were expecting food in libraries.
vijaybritto 17 days ago [-]
So if they digitally scan the books and publish on the internet for free then there wouldn't be any knowledge gap. These purpose of a library is fulfilled after that in my opinion
mrlongroots 17 days ago [-]
Yes, that is sensible.
While India has a moral claim to these artifacts, it will take another decade or two of growth before there is adequate bureaucratic bandwidth to provision the necessary infra needed to maintain them at home. Until then, the status quo works.
jopsen 17 days ago [-]
> While India has a moral claim to these artifacts
Does it really? It sounds like many of these books were purchased while they were still in print.
If anything shouldn't buying books/media this way be good for publishing industry in India at the time?
(Arguably, a small impact if any)
aadarsh13 17 days ago [-]
as a UChicago student can confirm that this was incredibly shocking when I first saw it… the expanse of the collection is really unmatched and crazy
17 days ago [-]
mwachs 17 days ago [-]
This is just a fascinating outcome of some public policy.
n4r9 17 days ago [-]
> India was one of the largest recipients of this food aid, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s when it faced severe food shortages.
Slightly tangential, but does anyone know why India faced such shortages in the 50s and 60s? I found an article on the subject [0] but it seems to come down to little more than mild crop yield variation combined with market speculation.
This is a period of India's history that I find particularly interesting by way of comparison with China's "Great Famine". The latter is often put forward as a strong condemnation of communist economics, for example in the "Black Book of Communism". But in Chomsky's article response "Counting the bodies" (which I cannot seem to find a link for) he points out that India's per capita excess mortality rate over roughly this period is in fact greater than China's.
I'm neither an authoritarian communist or a big fan of Chomsky's, but I would love to find reliable sources on this topic to come to my own conclusions.
<quotes>
Low productivity: In the context of India's rapidly growing population, the country's traditional agricultural practices yielded insufficient food production. By the 1960s, this low productivity led India to experience food grain shortages that were more severe than those of other developing countries.[1]
The effort was in fact an adoption of America's agriculture land grant system for universities on Indian soil. It helped launch what we now commonly call India's "green revolution." The U.S. Government, through the United States Agency for International Development (AID) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, partnering with the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, helped establish five state agriculture universities in India - including the Punjab Agricultural University - PAU - in Ludhiana. This was a significant joint intellectual and scientific effort: American universities sent educators and agricultural advisors to India to work side-by-side with Indian scientists and students. At the same time, American universities welcomed a corps of Indian agricultural specialists to American university campuses where they could learn first-hand about the technologies we employed in productive farming, ranching and crop science.[2]
</quote>
n4r9 17 days ago [-]
Thanks for the links.
It does seem like outdated agricultural practices and a booming population are critical factors. But that doesn't easily explain why there was an acute food shortage in 1958-59, despite rising yields (as per the article I linked).
rawgabbit 17 days ago [-]
From the URL you posted. “There was actually no shortage of food grains, but what worried the people and the Government was the increase in food grains prices.”
I remember reading during Indian Green Revolution was the introduction of practices to prevent hoarding and speculation. Unfortunately I don’t remember the details.
anon291 17 days ago [-]
India and China both had socialist systems at the time, so using India as some kind of foil to China's communism is not going to work.
People confuse democracy with the free market. It's not. India up until the 90s had a tightly regulated economy that rivaled China's economic control.
n4r9 17 days ago [-]
By all accounts I've read, describing India as "socialist" in the 1950s is not quite right. You only need look at the article I linked to see that a big reason for people going hungry was because couldn't afford the rising food prices. The prices being determined by purchasing power and market forces. And there was a functioning parliamentary democracy. At best you could say it was a mixed economy where the ruling party had some socialist economic policies. But you could say that about many modern European countries. So I still think the comparison with China is interesting.
anon291 16 days ago [-]
Based on my own parents telling, I believe there was food rationing, price controls, licensing for basic businesses, etc
Yes more free than China, but not so much market wise. All centrally planned from what I understand
I could be wrong. Indian politics is not my strong point . I do think many people conflate it being the largest democracy for it being a free market.
I personally witnessed the economic reforms of the 90s as an outsider via several visits and it was interesting to see as an outsider.
n4r9 16 days ago [-]
Food rationing has certainly happened in India's recent history. The British colonial administration established it in the 40s, and it was then revived in the 60s following acute shortages. But prior to that revival, food availability and pricing seems to have been subject to market forces. This suggests - if anything - that central planning was actually used to prevent famine deaths. But it is very difficult to find much accessible literature on that period.
amriksohata 17 days ago [-]
There are almost no recorded famines in India before Mughal or British rule, or after British rule either.
India was a bastion of food, crop and spice growth however incoming invaders did not have the knowledge of agriculture in the same way local indians did (british named it indore method etc)
aaron695 17 days ago [-]
[dead]
causality0 17 days ago [-]
[flagged]
solalf 17 days ago [-]
From their bio:
“My dissertation was a linguistic and cultural examination of disability as portrayed in Medieval Icelandic genre of the Sagas and Þættir of Icelanders.”
If they weren’t a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, you’d think this was straight out of Portlandia.
bawolff 17 days ago [-]
What's so weird about that?
Studying how a specific ancient culture potrayed and felt about disability seems like a reasonable thing to study.
Sure, maybe its not as immediately useful as say science, but if you are going to study ancient cultures, analyzing the writings they left behind is one of the main ways to do it.
JSteph22 17 days ago [-]
If it's not immediately useful, at what point in the future will it become useful?
Probably never.
dpig_ 17 days ago [-]
What kind of an anemic society do you want to live in, that everyone should only be an expert on capital-P Profitable subjects?
bpodgursky 17 days ago [-]
It's not that it's unprofitable. It's that it's un-interesting.
It's not interesting now, and will never be interesting. It was selected as a topic because it hit the right buzzwords, and nobody will ever read it out of genuine interest. Nobody will re-think their worldview from the conclusions.
We live in a massive universe, in the most exciting time in human history. There are a thousand times more topics to research than there will ever be people or time to do so. To pick a pointless dissertation topic in this open, vast universe of potential is a profound waste of human potential. It's sad.
JumpCrisscross 17 days ago [-]
> It's not interesting now, and will never be interesting
You’re writing off Icelandic culture as having nothing useful to suggest to modern civilisation. Given their parliament is the oldest continuously-operating one in the world, I’d say you’re dead wrong. What’s sad is that you’re dismissing books you haven’t read. Which is ironically pertinent to this article—it’s what India has been doing.
bawolff 17 days ago [-]
> Nobody will re-think their worldview from the conclusions.
Did you read their dissertation? How do you know?
> It was selected as a topic because it hit the right buzzwords, and nobody will ever read it out of genuine interest
I don't think that is true. How societies balance group needs versus individual needs, especially for individuals with unique needs or who may not be able to contribute in the same way as most is a pretty perenial question.
Certainly in the greek context people have talked and argued about sparta's alleged harsh attitude towards disabled people since forever. Like its a pretty pernial source of debate, and has echoes in more modern movements such as eugenics in the 1900s thousands of years later.
All that is to say. This isn't a particularly buzzwordy topic. Most computer science disertations are more buzwordy than this.
bawolff 17 days ago [-]
I consider history to be useful right now. The past influences the present and guides the future. I meant immediate as in like instructions on how to build a car.
throwup238 17 days ago [-]
I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a shitbird (with all respect to Mr Lahey) but it seems to be a moot point given that these collections can be digitized and indexed, opening them up to far more people than a few hundred thousand physical copies would have, especially for researchers who need to search vast collections.
Indian universities (and the American ones with the collections) should fund a full digitization program. It’s not like the collections are closed to researchers and all of the money for the purchases went right back to the Indian economy.
solalf 17 days ago [-]
I believe the term is appropriate.
Not only would the books have mostly disappeared due to local conditions, they can indeed be, and often are, digitized.
Instead, we have a professor who seems to feel obligated to gaslight the US and portray it as “colonialist” even in the face of incredible outcomes of public policy.
Millions of Indians escaped starvation thanks to this policy and an astounding body of knowledge survived and was consequently studied, helping elevate Indian culture in academic circles. But no matter, this created “knowledge gaps”.
duskwuff 17 days ago [-]
The conclusion that this "created knowledge gaps" seems particularly inapt. If American universities had not purchased these particular books, they would have most likely been lost just like the rest of their respective print runs. The "knowledge gap" would have been even worse, as no one at all would have had access to those books.
solalf 17 days ago [-]
Also mind you, this is coming from an academic. Yet there’s no proof being brought to the argument that this gap does exist and they’re not saying “may or might”, they’re making what appears to be a purely ideological statement.
duskwuff 17 days ago [-]
There's certainly a hypothetical universe where American universities didn't buy these books, and they were instead acquired by Indian libraries which managed to preserve them. But that isn't our universe, and there's no clear means by which the US could brought it about.
fuzztester 17 days ago [-]
>Instead, we have a professor who seems to feel obligated to gaslight the US and portray it as “colonialist” even in the face of incredible outcomes of public policy.
I'm not talking about this particular case right now, although I may comment separately about it a little later, but the US did have a colonial past. See:
From that article, the 7th or so paragraph, highlighting is mine:
>Violent conflicts arose during the beginning of this period as indigenous peoples fought to preserve their territorial integrity from increasing European colonizers and from hostile indigenous neighbors who were equipped with Eurasian technology. Conflict between the various European empires and the indigenous peoples was a leading dynamic in the Americas into the 1800s, although some parts of the continent gained their independence from Europe by then, countries such as the United States continued to fight against Native Americans and practiced settler colonialism. The United States for example practiced a settler colonial policy of Manifest Destiny and the Trail of Tears.
The graphic after the first paragraph there (labelled "Graphic depicting the loss of Native American land to U.S. settlers in the 19th century"), is, well, graphic. See all that blue area disappearing?
We're perfectly aware of this, just as we're aware a large part of the starvation the US was saving Indians from was due to decades of the British forcing them to grow cash crops instead of food. An American collection of Indian works is no more a "colonial library" than an American collection of Irish works or of Canadian works.
fuzztester 16 days ago [-]
I may reply more comprehensively later, but a few points for now:
>decades of the British forcing
JFC. A few centuries, is more like it. That's how long the Brits enslaved India(ns) for, which could happen at all, and then continue, due to multiple reasons on both sides, including, as one interesting reason, some Indian groups (think small "kingdoms") backstabbing others, and colluding with the British, which is why Alexander won over Porus, it is said in some history books.
Maybe check British colonial history and history of India, in obvious places such as Wikipedia and Britannica (ironically, for the latter).
Also read about Winston Churchill and the Bengal famine, in which millions died, but don't just limit yourself to Wikipedia:
which you too seem to display in your comment, at least going by:
>the starvation the US was saving Indians from
Sure, they may have saved them from it (I was a kid at the time, too young to look it up in depth, but I vaguely remember reading / hearing something about it, including some newspaper scandals about the quality of some of the food supplied by the US - milo is one term I somewhat recollect, but I don't know the details), but they did not necessarily do it (only) for noble or altruistic intentions.
I would not be surprised if there was some quid pro quo demanded or made a condition for the help, as often is the case when the World Bank
or the International Monetary Fund gave financial aid to developing countries in times of crisis.
In fact I just did a quick google or two, and this is one link I found:
Ghost of PL-480 Returns as India Avoids the Wheat Trap All Over Again:
And let's not forget that the wrecked state of many such countries was at least in "good" part one of the results of European colonialism. The United States itself was earlier one such colony, as you know. Heard of the Boston tea party?
I have been to Boston, BTW, and have eaten at Legal Seafoods and other places in downtown Boston. Nice town. I liked the architecture of some of the historical public buildings. I think one of them was the Public Library.
That is a long and very interesting article. It also has links to more detailed articles on many of the sub topics.
Apart from general background information, it has many paragraphs about the way the CIA interfered in the affairs of many countries, including some famous examples that many people outside the US are well aware of.
seltzered_ 17 days ago [-]
"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.
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.
I would say M.S. Swaminathan as the father of Green revolution in India.
fakedang 16 days ago [-]
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.
hellgas00 17 days ago [-]
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.
Yes, the British starved millions to death. What does that have to do with an American program?
17 days ago [-]
leosanchez 17 days ago [-]
> but Michelson-Ambelang calls it a "colonial archive"
Didn't FDR pressure Churchill to give India independence ? It would make sense if the archive is in Briton.
raincole 17 days ago [-]
Shitbird is some strong word, but yeah that is a very weird take. If anything, a food shortage is a much more urgent problem than a book shortage.
throwawaysleep 17 days ago [-]
Yeah, as that program was the only reason a lot of these books survived. Manuscripts were specifically excluded, so the reason copies don’t survive in India was that they literally let them all rot.
Eliminating this program would just have meant global knowledge gaps.
thisislife2 17 days ago [-]
Not really. But I understand your outrage as you only have partial information - the western media often has a tendency to whitewash their foreign policy to show themselves as "benevolent" to poor and developing nations, when in fact most of it seeks to take advantage of weaker nations.
In all this "tit for tat" convoluted policies, like the PL-480 for India, it is easy to miss the fact that the US, one of the wealthiest nation in the world even in the 50's and 60's, was asking India, then an impoverished nation, to pay for the wheat they supplied to it.
> A key event took place in 1943 that extended India’s food shortage until the early 1950s. In 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered foodgrains meant for eastern parts of the country to be diverted to the British troops engaged in World War II. It resulted in a man-made famine in Bengal and the deaths of millions of people ... India signed a long-term Public Law (PL) 480 agreement to get food aid under Government agricultural trade development assistance, with the US in 1954. The agreement was signed a few more times before the US ended it in the late 1960s as Lal Bahadur Shastri and then Indira Gandhi were not willing to make policy changes, especially to allow privatisation of the industrial sector, in return for food aid.
>
> ... Food aid under PL480 not only drew flak but some critics pointed out that the wheat sent to India was “fit enough only for pigs!”. It was termed as a great insult that was to linger for long in people’s memory. Despite repeated pleas, the US gave only “a small quantity of rice” to India.
> Now, the US wants India to export its wheat to other parts of the world amidst rising prices due to the Ukraine war whereas India is avoiding falling into the wheat trap all over again ... In 1954, then US President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched the Public Law 480 (PL-480) ... It was an initiative to offload all the excess wheat that the US had cultivated with price support. The US also started using it as a tool of diplomacy, because when another nation is dependent on you for its food, you can easily compel it into submission ... It was however realised by India in the mid-1960s that American food supplies came with strings attached and were being used as a means of diplomatic interference. At one point, the US even came close to rejecting wheat shipments to India, which threatened to push the country to the brink of famine.
>
> ... Six decades after the PL-480 controversy broke out between the two countries, India and the US find themselves at a crossroads over the staple commodity all over again. This time around, India imposed restrictions on its wheat exports ... India has restricted exports in the background of a persistent heatwave and lack of rain compelling officials to lower wheat output estimates ... However, the US, Germany and other G-7 countries have been critical of India’s stance. They are arguing that the restrictions on wheat exports could worsen the current food crisis in the world. Asking India to export wheat on the terms and conditions set by the Western world for its own advantage is more of a condescending attempt to tell the country that it somehow owes the sole responsibility to relax the soaring global prices. The richer nations, therefore, want India to do most of the heavy lifting ... This is in sharp contrast to Washington’s own track record. Remember, the US could have left India in a severe food crisis in the 1960s had New Delhi not managed to augment agricultural production within time. At that time, the US was motivated by its self-interest and India’s refusal to take sides between the USSR and the US. Today, India isn’t abandoning its moral responsibility, yet the US is sermonising it over wheat exports.
The only kind thing I have to say about the PL-480 or the "food for peace" program is that the American politicians taught us Indians a very valuable lesson - the need to become self-reliant to stave off exploitation. (Ironically, when it comes to people to people relationship, ordinary Indians and Americans really hit it off and work well together - for e.g. India's space, nuclear and even agricultural programs owes a lot to American scientists and thinkers. But this still hasn't translated to a close political relationships because Indian and American politicians just don't see eye to eye).
zerop 17 days ago [-]
How people are unearthing knowledge from ancient libraries using Claude
Our prime minister and most citizens love to brag about "ancient culture" and "proud history", but preservation of our own history and public record was and is done much better by the British and Americans. It's truly nauseating.
Peoples who achieved more than their ancestors have less history to be prideful of, since they are proud of their present.
It's also in state sanctioned ideology too, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Dream
`Xi said that the Chinese Dream is the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation"`
If more literally translated, this is pretty much the Chinese version of "Making China Great Again".
You're probably correct that this doesn't apply during the cultural revolution (and maybe for the most of the 20th century), but that's like a long gone boomer era.
Yes. I think so too.
The bragging is mostly patriotism and it wouldn't be a wonder if the same patriotism made them wish they could erase or forget their own embarrassing past two centuries of history. Most of the historic records before that point were totally destroyed or lost so feeling proud of what's left and moving on is not bad but seriously not prioritizing preservation is really ignorant.
It's actually cultural. Even foreign historians from a thousand years back such as Al Biruni criticized the Indian cultural norms of focusing on oral traditions, instead of written text, and the use of assumptions, story telling and exaggerations instead of facts and accurate retelling, which in turn feeds into a culture that prioritized fantasy over curiosity. It's stunning to say how we can obtain accurate records of the locations of the homes destroyed in the Great Fire of London in the 16th century, but don't have an accurate account of many kings in the Indian subcontinent during the 19th century.
This could have been a direct result of the caste system, wherein the deep study of literature was only allowed for Brahmins - not even the kings and nobility.
The actual situation which is revealed was different, if not quite contrary, for at least amongst the Hindus. It was the groups termed Shudras, and the castes considered below them who predominated in the thousands of the then still-existing schools in practically each of these areas."
Treat a book properly, and thousands of people across future decades will be able to peruse it. Treat it like garbage, and that knowledge won't be available in the future. It's the same with digitization. You need a plan to keep all the books you digitize, or else it's in danger of getting lost if the government/responsible person gets defunded/deprioritized.
All talk about "glorious history of culture and science" is hollow if you cannot store proof of it properly.
I think part of the problem is exactly this. We don't say Spain should be embarrassed at the Muslim conquest, yet we're expected to say India should be 'ashamed' (for what?) for their past two centuries? History just is... We should stop assigning emotional value to it.
The issue here is twofold. Firstly, India is not unique in this pursuit. China also has taken charge of constructing its own history, and sometimes it's at odds with Western thinking. Often time, the oral / traditional accounts are found to be true.
Secondly, the West also falls into magical thinking. For example, right here, you are parroting the idea that Indian heterodoxy over their own history is misguided. However, it has a clear historical basis in the fact that Britain tried to expropriate most of its history. I don't mean taking various artifacts.
I mean that, for many years, Western historians pushed the idea that the Indus Valley Civilization inhabitants were not related to modern Indians. They couldn't deal with the fact that Indians may have had one of the oldest, largest, and richest ancient civilizations. Of course history has proved them wrong.... Harappan genes are well represented in the Indian subcontinent.
So, sure, we can make all kinds of claims about Indian historians inflating their own history (I would agree), but to then say that Western historians don't is just wrong... Remember, Nazi Germany's racial policy is the direct result of a ridiculously flawed and fantastical understanding of Indian history by Western historians. Like it or not, the Nazis were western too (and besides, plenty of non-German historians agreed with them... we just like to forget about that).
Finally, we cannot ignore the impact of Nazism here. Even today, it is difficult to talk about Aryans without conjuring up images of genocidal Germans. Research has to be qualified and disclaimed so that people don't take the objective historical record and try to justify more atrocities.
For example, going back to the IVC. European historians were insistent that the Aryans civilized India, and many insisted that the IVC was Aryan, and not really 'Indian'. Again, the evidence is very clear that the Harappans have no steppe ancestry. But again, we have an example of the very sort of behavior you accuse india of, except by British historians.
No? India is unique in this pursuit because China didn't take as big of an hit as India did. The fact that The Vedas were preserved till now is well enough proof that oral accounts were not useless.
I'm an Indian. I myself can't trace my ancestry past my great grandfather lol(similar to most of the current native black Americans living in the USA) because no records were maintained as that was how insignificant avg. Indian life in India was viewed as back then, thanks to great philanthropists like Mr. Winston Churchill(not like I care). I don't think I can get through to the other comment that started out with the "c-word" and pointed out about castes and oral accounts but lineage of nobles and kings were well maintained by Brahmins and after a rough 2 centuries, very little was left to back up such claims of proper record maintenance so there's no point in fretting over it. Thanks sharing about Nazism, that's news to me.
After seeing people around me, I started to believe that Indians have an inferiority complex engraved into them due to the colonialism and they don't value books or their own history because they don't value themselves in the first place, which was the context behind my previous comment. I think it resulted as a side effect due to the helplessness they felt after what they lost, namely their heritage and their identity along with it. All this makes it seem like their inferiority complex is not going away anytime soon. Gotta see.
I've known Indians to treat books with respect. It's ingrained in the culture. Books can't be on the floor or touched with a foot. Kids spend days learning how to create books sleeves with brown crafts. Texybooks are well treated due to hand-me-down culture. Vidya (books) is specifically worshipped online home idol-houses. Pirated books or fake photo copies get mistreated, but mostly because they're printed on low budget paper backs. The state of libraries is bad, but so is the state of all infrastructure generally.
In the US, I have yet to see individuals take extraordinary care of books. Yes, textbooks worth $100+ are well treated, but anything that expensive is well treated. (I still have an old HC Verma copy). Libraries are exemplary, but the budgets are incomparable.
I will agree on the sorry state of Indian liberal arts including museums and libraries. The education, quality of scholarship and resulting professionals are subpar compared to the western world. India has excellent STEM and Medical education. The rest have a long way to go.
Feet don't have any use for books, so that doesn't matter much. Book sleeves and brown crafts are because of school rules, else those don't happen. Anyway, you should see how the books within those brown sleeves get by end of school year. Books get handed down in good shape only when a parent is unusually strict about those books (mine were, which is why I have a chip on my shoulder regarding this topic) or if the kid is conscientious. Woe betide you if you loan a book to a random friend; there are good chances it won't come back whole because of the "why-should-I-care-I-don't-own-it" mentality.
Part of it, as you imply, is the cheaper price, and thus quality and binding of the books made in India.
It explains in some swirly script language, execpt for "5Rs", that there is a fine for defacing the building (I had it translated).
From another part:
> Mr Michelson-Ambelang told the BBC that the removal of books from South Asia through programmes like PL-480 "creates knowledge gaps", as researchers from there often need to travel to the West to access these resources.
The knowledge gap is that America has the books and India doesn’t. If the books had stayed in India, I think that would have closed the knowledge gap because nobody would have them. They would have been lost just like the other copies of the books.
Hot and humid climates result in (historically)rapid decay of plant and animal based writing surfaces
Were the Vedas et al memorized before being written down? Yes, of course. However, regular discoveries are made of ancient manuscripts in various Buddhist temples.
Humidity doesn’t guarantee that something will rot. It makes it more likely.
The item will need to be protected from the natural environment. Or stored in a location that is an exception to the general climate.
Compare that to the Middle East. Where the natural climate assists in preservation.
(I could list many similar paternalistic takes)
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crgy4w221z5o
and
>Mr Michelson-Ambelang told the BBC that the removal of books from South Asia through programmes like PL-480 "creates knowledge gaps", as researchers from there often need to travel to the West to access these resources.
and
> It is unclear whether all the books acquired by US universities from India at that time are still available there. According to Maya Dodd, of India's FLAME University, many books now unavailable in India can be found in the University of Chicago's library collections, all marked with the stamp saying "PL-480".
Although a charitable reading is they aren't available because of decay.
Beep beep boop boop this wasn't written by an LLM.
While India has a moral claim to these artifacts, it will take another decade or two of growth before there is adequate bureaucratic bandwidth to provision the necessary infra needed to maintain them at home. Until then, the status quo works.
Does it really? It sounds like many of these books were purchased while they were still in print.
If anything shouldn't buying books/media this way be good for publishing industry in India at the time? (Arguably, a small impact if any)
Slightly tangential, but does anyone know why India faced such shortages in the 50s and 60s? I found an article on the subject [0] but it seems to come down to little more than mild crop yield variation combined with market speculation.
This is a period of India's history that I find particularly interesting by way of comparison with China's "Great Famine". The latter is often put forward as a strong condemnation of communist economics, for example in the "Black Book of Communism". But in Chomsky's article response "Counting the bodies" (which I cannot seem to find a link for) he points out that India's per capita excess mortality rate over roughly this period is in fact greater than China's.
I'm neither an authoritarian communist or a big fan of Chomsky's, but I would love to find reliable sources on this topic to come to my own conclusions.
[0] https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/india/food-problem/food-...
<quotes> Low productivity: In the context of India's rapidly growing population, the country's traditional agricultural practices yielded insufficient food production. By the 1960s, this low productivity led India to experience food grain shortages that were more severe than those of other developing countries.[1]
The effort was in fact an adoption of America's agriculture land grant system for universities on Indian soil. It helped launch what we now commonly call India's "green revolution." The U.S. Government, through the United States Agency for International Development (AID) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, partnering with the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, helped establish five state agriculture universities in India - including the Punjab Agricultural University - PAU - in Ludhiana. This was a significant joint intellectual and scientific effort: American universities sent educators and agricultural advisors to India to work side-by-side with Indian scientists and students. At the same time, American universities welcomed a corps of Indian agricultural specialists to American university campuses where they could learn first-hand about the technologies we employed in productive farming, ranching and crop science.[2] </quote>
It does seem like outdated agricultural practices and a booming population are critical factors. But that doesn't easily explain why there was an acute food shortage in 1958-59, despite rising yields (as per the article I linked).
I remember reading during Indian Green Revolution was the introduction of practices to prevent hoarding and speculation. Unfortunately I don’t remember the details.
People confuse democracy with the free market. It's not. India up until the 90s had a tightly regulated economy that rivaled China's economic control.
Yes more free than China, but not so much market wise. All centrally planned from what I understand
I could be wrong. Indian politics is not my strong point . I do think many people conflate it being the largest democracy for it being a free market.
I personally witnessed the economic reforms of the 90s as an outsider via several visits and it was interesting to see as an outsider.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_I...
If they weren’t a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, you’d think this was straight out of Portlandia.
Studying how a specific ancient culture potrayed and felt about disability seems like a reasonable thing to study.
Sure, maybe its not as immediately useful as say science, but if you are going to study ancient cultures, analyzing the writings they left behind is one of the main ways to do it.
Probably never.
It's not interesting now, and will never be interesting. It was selected as a topic because it hit the right buzzwords, and nobody will ever read it out of genuine interest. Nobody will re-think their worldview from the conclusions.
We live in a massive universe, in the most exciting time in human history. There are a thousand times more topics to research than there will ever be people or time to do so. To pick a pointless dissertation topic in this open, vast universe of potential is a profound waste of human potential. It's sad.
You’re writing off Icelandic culture as having nothing useful to suggest to modern civilisation. Given their parliament is the oldest continuously-operating one in the world, I’d say you’re dead wrong. What’s sad is that you’re dismissing books you haven’t read. Which is ironically pertinent to this article—it’s what India has been doing.
Did you read their dissertation? How do you know?
> It was selected as a topic because it hit the right buzzwords, and nobody will ever read it out of genuine interest
I don't think that is true. How societies balance group needs versus individual needs, especially for individuals with unique needs or who may not be able to contribute in the same way as most is a pretty perenial question.
Certainly in the greek context people have talked and argued about sparta's alleged harsh attitude towards disabled people since forever. Like its a pretty pernial source of debate, and has echoes in more modern movements such as eugenics in the 1900s thousands of years later.
All that is to say. This isn't a particularly buzzwordy topic. Most computer science disertations are more buzwordy than this.
Indian universities (and the American ones with the collections) should fund a full digitization program. It’s not like the collections are closed to researchers and all of the money for the purchases went right back to the Indian economy.
Instead, we have a professor who seems to feel obligated to gaslight the US and portray it as “colonialist” even in the face of incredible outcomes of public policy.
Millions of Indians escaped starvation thanks to this policy and an astounding body of knowledge survived and was consequently studied, helping elevate Indian culture in academic circles. But no matter, this created “knowledge gaps”.
I'm not talking about this particular case right now, although I may comment separately about it a little later, but the US did have a colonial past. See:
European_colonization_of_the_Americas:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_colonization_of_the...
From that article, the 7th or so paragraph, highlighting is mine:
>Violent conflicts arose during the beginning of this period as indigenous peoples fought to preserve their territorial integrity from increasing European colonizers and from hostile indigenous neighbors who were equipped with Eurasian technology. Conflict between the various European empires and the indigenous peoples was a leading dynamic in the Americas into the 1800s, although some parts of the continent gained their independence from Europe by then, countries such as the United States continued to fight against Native Americans and practiced settler colonialism. The United States for example practiced a settler colonial policy of Manifest Destiny and the Trail of Tears.
And links from that paragraph:
Settler_colonialism:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settler_colonialism
The graphic after the first paragraph there (labelled "Graphic depicting the loss of Native American land to U.S. settlers in the 19th century"), is, well, graphic. See all that blue area disappearing?
Manifest destiny:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
Trail of Tears:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears
Also see:
Banana republic:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic
Also see:
Philippines:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines
Under the History section there, see this sub-section:
Spanish and American colonial rule (1565–1934).
A link from there:
Philippine–American War:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_...
>decades of the British forcing
JFC. A few centuries, is more like it. That's how long the Brits enslaved India(ns) for, which could happen at all, and then continue, due to multiple reasons on both sides, including, as one interesting reason, some Indian groups (think small "kingdoms") backstabbing others, and colluding with the British, which is why Alexander won over Porus, it is said in some history books.
Maybe check British colonial history and history of India, in obvious places such as Wikipedia and Britannica (ironically, for the latter).
Also read about Winston Churchill and the Bengal famine, in which millions died, but don't just limit yourself to Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhusree_Mukerjee#cite_note...
http://www.madhusree.com/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill%27s_Secret_War
There, did some of your homework for you.
And let's not forget:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism
which you too seem to display in your comment, at least going by:
>the starvation the US was saving Indians from
Sure, they may have saved them from it (I was a kid at the time, too young to look it up in depth, but I vaguely remember reading / hearing something about it, including some newspaper scandals about the quality of some of the food supplied by the US - milo is one term I somewhat recollect, but I don't know the details), but they did not necessarily do it (only) for noble or altruistic intentions.
I would not be surprised if there was some quid pro quo demanded or made a condition for the help, as often is the case when the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund gave financial aid to developing countries in times of crisis.
In fact I just did a quick google or two, and this is one link I found:
Ghost of PL-480 Returns as India Avoids the Wheat Trap All Over Again:
https://www.news18.com/news/opinion/ghost-of-pl-480-returns-...
And one more for you, for the new year:
US Raising 'Human Rights in India' is Like the Pot Calling the Kettle Black
https://www.news18.com/news/opinion/us-raising-human-rights-...
And let's not forget that the wrecked state of many such countries was at least in "good" part one of the results of European colonialism. The United States itself was earlier one such colony, as you know. Heard of the Boston tea party?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party
I have been to Boston, BTW, and have eaten at Legal Seafoods and other places in downtown Boston. Nice town. I liked the architecture of some of the historical public buildings. I think one of them was the Public Library.
History of the Central Intelligence Agency:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Central_Intel...
That is a long and very interesting article. It also has links to more detailed articles on many of the sub topics.
Apart from general background information, it has many paragraphs about the way the CIA interfered in the affairs of many countries, including some famous examples that many people outside the US are well aware of.
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
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.
Didn't FDR pressure Churchill to give India independence ? It would make sense if the archive is in Briton.
Eliminating this program would just have meant global knowledge gaps.
In all this "tit for tat" convoluted policies, like the PL-480 for India, it is easy to miss the fact that the US, one of the wealthiest nation in the world even in the 50's and 60's, was asking India, then an impoverished nation, to pay for the wheat they supplied to it.
> A key event took place in 1943 that extended India’s food shortage until the early 1950s. In 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered foodgrains meant for eastern parts of the country to be diverted to the British troops engaged in World War II. It resulted in a man-made famine in Bengal and the deaths of millions of people ... India signed a long-term Public Law (PL) 480 agreement to get food aid under Government agricultural trade development assistance, with the US in 1954. The agreement was signed a few more times before the US ended it in the late 1960s as Lal Bahadur Shastri and then Indira Gandhi were not willing to make policy changes, especially to allow privatisation of the industrial sector, in return for food aid. > > ... Food aid under PL480 not only drew flak but some critics pointed out that the wheat sent to India was “fit enough only for pigs!”. It was termed as a great insult that was to linger for long in people’s memory. Despite repeated pleas, the US gave only “a small quantity of rice” to India.
(How India overcame food emergency, attained self-sufficiency (August 2022) - https://web.archive.org/web/20240616192936/https://www.thehi... ).
> Now, the US wants India to export its wheat to other parts of the world amidst rising prices due to the Ukraine war whereas India is avoiding falling into the wheat trap all over again ... In 1954, then US President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched the Public Law 480 (PL-480) ... It was an initiative to offload all the excess wheat that the US had cultivated with price support. The US also started using it as a tool of diplomacy, because when another nation is dependent on you for its food, you can easily compel it into submission ... It was however realised by India in the mid-1960s that American food supplies came with strings attached and were being used as a means of diplomatic interference. At one point, the US even came close to rejecting wheat shipments to India, which threatened to push the country to the brink of famine. > > ... Six decades after the PL-480 controversy broke out between the two countries, India and the US find themselves at a crossroads over the staple commodity all over again. This time around, India imposed restrictions on its wheat exports ... India has restricted exports in the background of a persistent heatwave and lack of rain compelling officials to lower wheat output estimates ... However, the US, Germany and other G-7 countries have been critical of India’s stance. They are arguing that the restrictions on wheat exports could worsen the current food crisis in the world. Asking India to export wheat on the terms and conditions set by the Western world for its own advantage is more of a condescending attempt to tell the country that it somehow owes the sole responsibility to relax the soaring global prices. The richer nations, therefore, want India to do most of the heavy lifting ... This is in sharp contrast to Washington’s own track record. Remember, the US could have left India in a severe food crisis in the 1960s had New Delhi not managed to augment agricultural production within time. At that time, the US was motivated by its self-interest and India’s refusal to take sides between the USSR and the US. Today, India isn’t abandoning its moral responsibility, yet the US is sermonising it over wheat exports.
(Ghost of PL-480 Returns as India Avoids the Wheat Trap All Over Again (May 2022) - https://web.archive.org/web/20220525074511/https://www.news1... )
The only kind thing I have to say about the PL-480 or the "food for peace" program is that the American politicians taught us Indians a very valuable lesson - the need to become self-reliant to stave off exploitation. (Ironically, when it comes to people to people relationship, ordinary Indians and Americans really hit it off and work well together - for e.g. India's space, nuclear and even agricultural programs owes a lot to American scientists and thinkers. But this still hasn't translated to a close political relationships because Indian and American politicians just don't see eye to eye).
https://x.com/PrintedPathways/status/1865637416637231406