India's Diabetes Epidemic: How Colonial Food Policies and Agricultural Modernization Inadvertently Replaced Healthy Millets with HighGlycemic Rice and Wheat

Abstract

The diabetes pandemic in India, which covers more than 77 million adults by 2025, is not just a contemporary lifestyle illness. This paper traces the origins of this health crisis by analyzing colonial-era famine management policies and post-independence agricultural modernization programs that actively displace the varieties of traditional grains in India with a rice-wheat duopoly. This paper, through the analysis of literature on the history of British famine, nutrition science, and socioeconomic statistics, demonstrates how British policies of famine management, which were influenced by administrative efficiency, but not nutrition, led to a one-hundred-year dietary revolution. The Green Revolution, which was successful in averting starvation, intensified this grain consolidation with the processes of institutional lockin. The metabolic consequences are profound refined wheat and polished rice have glycemic indices 30- 40 points higher than traditional millets (70-80 vs. 50-55), and the results directly lead to insulin resistance. The change removed the sources of dietary fiber, enhanced the deficiencies of micronutrients, and perfectly matched the metabolically susceptible Indian thin-fat phenotype. Although the thin-fat phenotype is an indicator of a population-wide tendency, there is individual variation such that not all Indians become diabetic despite being subjected to high-glycemic diets. However, population statistics indicate that the South Asians as a population group have metabolic effects of their diet choices at a lower threshold than other groups. The article is a synthesis of historical policy research, nutritional biochemistry and implementation plans, which provides evidence-based solutions to dietary paths that individuals, communities and policymakers can use to revert this trend. These results prove that the diabetic epidemic in India is not a riddle or even a fate that is destined to happen but the logical consequence of certain, fixable policy choices that focused on the ease of administration rather than on nutritional prudence.