Essay · Section B29 September 2026

Scarcity does not create conflict; it reveals how we share.

In 1943 a nine-year-old boy at Santiniketan watched starving people walk through the town on their way to Calcutta. Nearly four decades later, as an economist, Amartya Sen went back to the figures of the Bengal famine, in which about three million people died. In Poverty and Famines (1981) he showed that the amount of food available in Bengal in 1943 was not unusually low. It was higher than in 1941, when there had been no famine. What had collapsed was the ability of labourers, fishermen and artisans to buy food, as wartime prices rose far faster than their wages, while the government made sure that Calcutta and the war effort were supplied first. The famine was not simply caused by a shortage of rice. It was caused by the way the available rice was shared.

Scarcity is a fact of nature; a monsoon can fail and a river can run low. But whether a shortage becomes a quarrel, a riot or a famine depends on the rules for sharing it. This essay argues that scarcity works like a test. It shows three things that plenty hides: whether the rules for sharing were agreed before the shortage, whether the weakest are protected first or the loudest are served first, and whether those who share trust the information they are given. Where these three are present, a scarce resource can be shared peacefully. Where they are absent, even a modest shortage turns into conflict.

Rivers show this most clearly. The Mahanadi rises in Chhattisgarh and flows into Odisha, whose Hirakud dam and delta depend on it. For decades the two States shared it without much difficulty. The dispute sharpened after Chhattisgarh built barrages upstream, and it is felt most in dry years, when Odisha fears that less water reaches Hirakud. A tribunal was constituted in 2018, and the States are now trying direct talks. The Cauvery tells the same story over a longer period. Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have quarrelled over it since the agreements of 1892 and 1924. The tribunal’s award of 2007 and the Supreme Court’s judgment of 2018 fixed shares for a normal year, but the flare-ups of 2016 and 2023 came in years of poor rain, when there was no agreed way to share the shortfall. The Court itself placed drinking water above all other uses, which is a statement about fairness, not about hydrology.

Where rules exist before the crisis, scarcity can be managed even between enemies. The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 survived the wars of 1965 and 1971 and was kept alive for more than six decades, until India placed it in abeyance in 2025 after the Pahalgam attack. Researchers led by Aaron Wolf at Oregon State University, studying recorded interactions over shared rivers in the second half of the twentieth century, found that cooperation was far more common than conflict. Villages have shown the same thing. In 1974 Vilasrao Salunke began the Pani Panchayat at Naigaon in Pune district, a drought-prone area. Water from a shared lift-irrigation scheme was allotted according to the number of people in a family rather than the amount of land it owned, so landless families also received a share, and water-hungry sugarcane was not allowed. The water was still scarce, but the rules made it possible to share it without conflict.

Scarcity also exposes waste that plenty conceals. In The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck describes Californian farmers destroying oranges and potatoes to keep prices up while the children of migrant workers go hungry: “There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation.” The United Nations Environment Programme’s Food Waste Index Report 2024 estimated that over a billion tonnes of food were wasted in 2022, while hundreds of millions of people went hungry. India has improved its measurement of post-harvest loss but still knows little about waste in shops and homes. In a year when the monsoon ended about 12 per cent below normal and pulse prices rose by up to a tenth within a month, a poor family does not stop eating; it gives up protein first. Shortage falls on the people who have no stock to fall back on.

The distribution of gains is tested in the same way. Mining brings revenue to the State but dust, blasting and lost land to nearby villages. District Mineral Foundations, created by the 2015 amendment to the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, were meant to return part of that wealth to the people who bear the cost. The CAG has now found that Odisha’s foundations spent ₹2,578.73 crore under a category that the rules never created. The money was not scarce; the voice of those it was meant for was. Article 39(b) of the Constitution asks the State to distribute the material resources of the community “as best to subserve the common good”, and that duty is most important when there is little to go round.

The counter-argument is strong. Scarcity does sometimes cause conflict by itself. When a reservoir is empty, no formula can satisfy everyone, and scholars have linked prolonged droughts to unrest in several regions. Rationing in the name of fairness also has a poor record: India’s controls on kerosene, sugar and cement produced black markets and diversion, and Friedrich Hayek argued in “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945) that prices carry information about scarcity that no planner can gather. These points are valid. But they show that absolute scarcity is rare and that the method of sharing matters even more when it occurs. Prices ration efficiently, but they cannot guarantee that the poorest will eat. Sen’s Bengal had working markets. What it lacked was a government answerable to the people who starved.

The legitimacy of sharing also depends on whether sacrifice is shared. In Britain during the Second World War, rationing applied to everyone, and many poor families ate better than before the war. In 1965, facing a food shortage and pressure over American wheat supplies, Lal Bahadur Shastri asked Indians to give up one meal a week and followed that practice himself. People accept shortage when they see it shared fairly, and they resent it when a few are protected. As the war in West Asia raises the price of crude and diesel is rationed, the question the public will ask is not only how much fuel there is, but who is being asked to manage with less.

The remedies follow from this. Agree on rules for sharing distress before the dry year comes, whether in the Mahanadi talks or in reservoir management. Publish the data, from reservoir levels to foundation accounts, so that each side can check what it is being told. Protect the weakest first: drinking water before industry, the landless before the large landowner, the village beside the mine before the district headquarters. Sen observed that no major famine has occurred in a functioning democracy with a free press, because governments that must face voters and newspapers cannot ignore starvation. Scarcity will return with every weak monsoon and every distant war. It does not decide whether we fight. It shows whether we have agreed, in advance and in good faith, on how to share.