Abstract: As a growing proportion of world’s population lives in cities and towns, food security is increasingly acquiring an urban character. The locus of food security research and policy agendas has correspondingly expanded from rural areas to include cities and towns in the past few years. However, the dominant discourse on urbanisation-food security relationship appears to be shaped by perspectives from the Global North and large cities, and shows a lack of adequate understanding of urbanisation-food security nexus in the small towns of the Global South. This talk aims to correct this bias. With a focus on India where urban growth is increasingly concentrated in small, former rural regions, this presentation will look at the food and nutrition security implications of the country’s rural-urban transition, with the larger purpose of improving public policy understanding on this important issue.
About the speaker: Chetan Choithani is Assistant Professor in the Inequality and Human Development Programme of the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies. The broad disciplinary domain of Chetan’s work is development studies. Within this area, his research and teaching interests include migration and urbanisation, food and nutrition, livelihoods, gender, and social policy and how they relate to development, particularly in the Indian context.