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Abstract
The current work attempts to organize a detailed and thematic survey of the key empirical works on the food security scenario of India. This review paper recognizes its collected literature as a sample based on which inferences about the larger population of actual analytical patterns on this issue are made. We concentrate our attention on the selected empirical works on this issue undertaken during the period 1991-92 till 2018-19. Our sample of evidence has been constructed by accounting for the facts such as the disaggregated nature of the evidences and the differences in quality of analysis across different sources, among others. We have stressed particularly on the issues, debates, controversies and proposed solutions that have characterized the efforts on the analysis of food insecurity threat in India. Preliminarily, we find that there is a strong disagreement among the analysts on matters such as the fundamental units of analysis; the appropriate economic and social frameworks needed to understand this issue; the policy matrix that can help tackle this challenge and the statistical and econometric strategies required for generating reliable as well as spatially and temporally consistent insights. The key insights of this paper include, among others, the importance of the macro-micro dimensions of the food insecurity challenge, the production-trade-productivity solutions on this issue, the quantity versus nutritional routes to attacking this challenge, the inherently multidisciplinary nature of food security analysis, the optimum institutional mechanisms for eliminating food insecurities and, the nexus between technology, productivity and distributional efficiencies in shifting India’s foodgrains production frontier to higher policy-targeted levels, still remain areas that require much more intense and exhaustive academic and policy exercises.