India, too, is undergoing extreme famine conditions. State officials say that villagers in isolated areas are living on roots, leaves and grass from parched rice fields.

A foreign relief worker reports on conditions in Calcutta: “By nutritional standards some of these people should be dead. You see some children eating grass, rats, the green scum off tanks.” Bernard Weinraub, writing in the New York Times of September 5, 1974, states: “The most searing scenes are visible. A child watches another eat an ice-cream stick. When the ice cream is finished and the wooden stick tossed in the gutter, the watcher picks it up and sucks it.”

Hungry people have already wreaked havoc in India, Bolivia and Ethiopia, rioting and looting stores of grain. M. P. Tripathi, a legislator from India’s northeastern state of Uttar Pradesh, warned: “There will undoubtedly be thousands of deaths on account of hunger. Crime will increase and riots will break out at several places.”

The pangs of hunger have driven some persons to terrible extremes. Newsweek of October 7, 1974, gives an example:

“In search of food, men are leaving their wives and children to fend for themselves. The Indian press reports cases of families committing suicide together rather than die a lingering death of starvation, and of distraught fathers throwing small children into the rivers to drown.”