UNDER the shadow of great wealth," the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore lamented, "starvation moves across the land." So it always has in India. Ten million died in the Bengali famine of 1770, four million in 1877. Shrunken bodies littered the streets of Calcutta in 1943. As recently as 1965 and 1966, when the monsoon rains failed, thousands would have died but for the emergency shipment of 10.5 million tons of U.S. wheat, one-fifth of the American crop. India has always seemed to be dismaying proof of the Malthusian thesis that the world's population...
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