By Rice Alone

By Rice Alone ANY GOVERNMENT anywhere in the world stands or falls by its ability or otherwise to feed the people. The United Front Government in West Bengal faces no greater test. Disparate as its constituents are. everyone in the Government knows this. Most Ministers also know the only answer, although some may be discreet in public. Yet a strange hesitancy still plagues the State's food policy, which is dangerous because the agricultural pattern in West Bengal is seasonal and time is running out fast. The Government, it appears, is not walking fast enough. It resigned itself to some mis-fires in the matter of its transfers of some IAS officers; the original order was modified under motley pressures; and the U F Government has so far failed to give the Slate a sense of new direction and a sense of new purpose. Nowhere is this uncertainty more pronounced than in the policy on procurement on which hinges the fate of the Government itself.