Essay · Section B23 September 2026

The hand that feeds is often the last to be fed.

Premchand’s last completed novel, Godaan, published in 1936, is the story of Hori, a small peasant who spends his whole life wanting one modest thing: a cow tied at his door. He ploughs, borrows, repays, is cheated, and borrows again, and in the end collapses while working as a labourer in the summer heat. As he lies dying, the village priest asks for the ritual gift of a cow. His wife Dhaniya puts the few coins she earned that day into the priest’s hand and says that this is her husband’s godaan. Premchand did not present this as bad luck. He presented it as the ordinary shape of a peasant’s life.

The prompt describes a pattern, not an accident. The people who produce what is most necessary often sell it with the least bargaining power, hold the least paper and carry the most risk. The pattern works through three mechanisms: the price chain, which moves value away from the producer; the record, which counts the owner rather than the worker; and control over shared resources, which rewards whoever can dig deepest. This essay argues that the pattern is real but not inevitable. The remedy is not charity but institutions that let the feeder bargain, be counted and be protected.

Famine shows the pattern at its starkest. Amartya Sen opened Poverty and Famines (1981) with a sentence that changed the study of hunger: “Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.” In the Bengal famine of 1943, he showed, the worst victims were rural labourers, fishermen and artisans, the very people who worked the food economy. Wartime demand from the city priced grain out of their reach. In Ireland in the 1840s, food continued to leave the country while its cultivators starved. In The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck describes fruit being destroyed to hold up prices while the children of the migrant pickers go hungry.

The same logic runs, more quietly, through ordinary markets today. A new estimate by researchers at the International Food Policy Research Institute finds that of each rupee an Indian household spends on food cooked at home, about 57.8 paise reaches the farm; when the family eats out, the farm gets just 8.4 paise. Under the cooperative model that Verghese Kurien built at Anand, Amul’s dairy farmers have historically received more than 60 per cent of the retail price, because they own the plant, the brand and the distribution. Their larger share came from ownership, not from anyone’s goodwill.

Recognition matters as much as price. Women are a large and growing part of India’s farm workforce, yet more than 41 per cent of female agricultural workers were unpaid in 2025, only about 14 per cent of operational holdings are with women, and women are only 23 per cent of PM-KISAN beneficiaries. The state pays the name on the land record, and that name is mostly a man’s. In A Field of One’s Own (1994), the economist Bina Agarwal argued that independent land rights, not employment alone, decide a woman’s security and bargaining power at home. The Food and Agriculture Organization’s State of Food and Agriculture report for 2010-11 estimated that equal access to resources could raise yields on women’s farms by 20 to 30 per cent. Maharashtra’s new law, which issues a ‘Woman Farmer Certificate’ regardless of land ownership, finally puts into practice the activity-based definition of a farmer set out in the National Policy for Farmers of 2007. The hand that sows is at last to be counted alongside the hand that holds the title.

Shared resources show the third mechanism. In the mid-1960s India lived ‘from ship to mouth’ on imported American wheat. The farmers of Punjab, using the new high-yielding seeds, made the country self-sufficient in grain. The nation’s hunger was solved with Punjab’s water. Today the State draws about 152 per cent of its extractable groundwater, and 72 per cent of its 153 blocks are in the red zone. As the water table falls, smallholders who cannot afford deeper tube-wells end up buying water from larger neighbours. The farmers who fed the country now pay twice, once to grow the crop and again for the water beneath their own fields.

The pattern reaches the next generation too. The child of a farm labourer often leaves home before any meal is cooked, and a school lunch comes too late for a hungry morning. Tamil Nadu has treated this as public business for a century, from P. Theagaraya Chetty’s meals in Madras corporation schools in 1922, through K. Kamaraj’s expansion, to a breakfast scheme started in 2022 that a different government has now extended to Classes 6 to 8, covering 34.64 lakh children. Feeding the feeder’s child is one of the cheapest corrections a state can make, and one of the most lasting.

The pattern is not limited to food. The Indian cavalrymen who took Haifa on 23 September 1918 still see their credit disputed by scholars who give it to British and Australian troops, a sign of how imperial memory ranked soldiers by race. Whoever does the foundational work tends to stand furthest from where value and credit are shared out.

The counter-position is serious. Markets pay for scarcity and risk, not for moral worth. The restaurant rupee pays for cooks, rent and service; in the United States the farm share of spending on food eaten out is just 4 per cent. The same study notes that gherkin farmers earn only 3 to 5 per cent of the retail price and still make more than tomato growers, whose share is higher. Nor is the Indian farmer forgotten by the state, which spends heavily on minimum support prices, free power and income transfers; in Punjab, free power is part of why the aquifer is draining. And ever since W. Arthur Lewis’s 1954 model of economic development, economists have argued that prosperity comes from moving labour out of farming into more productive work. Romanticising the feeder can trap him where he is.

Yet the objection ends up supporting the essay’s real claim. The issue is not the size of the share but who has the power to bargain for it. Gherkin growers do well because they are tied into contracts with buyers, and Amul’s farmers because they own the plant. Subsidies that follow the land title or the pump reach the biggest owner, not the woman or the tenant who does the work. So the remedy is not to fix prices out of sentiment. It is to record the cultivator, help farmers own the businesses downstream through cooperatives and producer companies, price scarce groundwater so that the deepest pump does not simply win, and treat a hungry child as a public responsibility. Article 39(b) of the Constitution asks that material resources be distributed to serve the common good, and Article 47 makes raising nutrition a primary duty of the state.

Hori’s wish was a small one. A society should measure its fairness not by the size of its harvest but by whether the people who bring it in eat well, own what they work and are counted when benefits are handed out. The hand that feeds does not need to be first at the table. It only needs a place there that no one can take away.