Question

Who is the author of "Hunger and Entitlements"?

• A. Khushwant Singh
• B. Amartya Sen
• C. Kiran Desai
• D. Arundhati Roy

Hint:

The title is about famine economics and the entitlement theory, a field linked with a Nobel laureate economist, not a novelist.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is B

This question tests knowledge of well known Indian authors and the books or research papers they have written. The title named here, "Hunger and Entitlements," belongs to a specific field of economics, so recognising the subject helps point to the right writer.

1. Khushwant Singh: He was a journalist and novelist known for works such as "Train to Pakistan" and his writing on Sikh history and Indian social life. He did not write on famine economics.
2. Amartya Sen: He is an economist who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his work on welfare economics and famine. His research introduced the "entitlement approach" to understanding hunger, which argues that famines happen not just from a shortage of food but from a failure of people's economic entitlement to get food. "Hunger and Entitlements" is a monograph he wrote setting out this theory.
3. Kiran Desai: She is a novelist best known for "The Inheritance of Loss," which won the Booker Prize in 2006. Her work is fiction, not economic research on hunger.
4. Arundhati Roy: She is a novelist and essayist known for "The God of Small Things" and for political essays. She has not written a work titled "Hunger and Entitlements."

The subject matter, an economic study of why famines occur, matches Amartya Sen's body of work, and "Hunger and Entitlements" is one of the texts where he laid out his entitlement theory of famine.

Let's summarize:

• Amartya Sen is the economist behind the entitlement approach to famine and hunger.
• The other three names are novelists or essayists, not economists working on famine theory.

The correct answer is Amartya Sen.