My father recalled sometime back the terrible drought that happened when he was a child: since the grains were running low, my grandfather would go out and dig tubers from surrounding fields, my grandmother would make something out of it for the kids. It is an experience that is far removed from my own. My father's occasional re-telling of this episode of his life affects me deeply, more so, because, although the effects of drought on rural p[oor has been minimized by the work of Amartya Sen, Dr Swaminathan and many others in the past decades, the effects have not been minimized to a level where extreme hardship and deaths don't occur. Here's a video I watched recently where Dr Swaminathan explains some of the connected issues that are caused by draught and what must be done about it:
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