Decaying rice stocks outside a mill in Raipur, Chhattisgarh state, in September.
Photographer: Abeer Khan/BloombergRotting Rice in India Fuels Discontent About Modi’s Food Policy
The top exporter of the grain has swelling inventories heading into another harvest.
In the state of Chhattisgarh, some 800 miles southeast of New Delhi, there’s so much unprocessed rice sitting in storage that it’s starting to rot.
The situation there is emblematic of much of rural India: Cattle graze next to sacks of grain, piled high and covered in black plastic sheets. At nearby mills, supplies from last year’s harvest sit outside, some of it infested with bugs or spoiled from the monsoon. As of late September, about 3 million metric tons of unmilled rice was in storage in Chhattisgarh alone, according to people familiar with the matter who weren’t authorized to be named.