starvation deaths during the Great Leap forward in China in the 1950s. The man who wrote that there were none was not really as well known a left economist as K N Raj was.
And K N Raj has written several peer reviewed (reviewed by peers from all parts of the ideological spectrum and not just the part is oriented to the left) articles that showed episode for episode, phase for phase, how the Chinese (led by Mas Tse Tung) truly dealt a body blow to the centuries old feudalism nurtured grinding poverty levels with a single measure - comprehensive land reforms !
And K N Raj also established, within the folds of the EPW as well as in several publications not necessarily leftist, how de facto feudalism and starvation level poverty continued hand in hand in India right through the 1970s and 80s and extended into the 1990s !
And the chief yardsticks that Raj used to compare autocratic but land reformed China and democratic but still feudal India - nutrition levels, literacy, longevity, share held by the lower classes in the countrys GDP and....land ownership - prove that the India of today (25 years after its celebrated launch of structural reforms) has not even matched the China of the Cultural revolution years in terms of poverty eradication !!
A detailed look into the figures of the Planning Commission (Niti Aayog), NSS, Census surveys, etc and those published annually by the agencies of the UN and the World Bank regarding human development in China will prove that
