Urban food insecurity and its determinants: a baseline study of Bengaluru

There is an increasing need to study urban food security in the global South. This is because of the monetization of food in urban areas and compounding vulnerability from other deprivations such as lack of access to infrastructure. We assess these claims in this paper, based on a city-wide household survey in Bengaluru (Bangalore) carried out in 2016 that used experiential measures of food security like the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale. We find that income and consumption do not have a clear relationship with food insecurity. However, socioeconomic dimensions like education level and wage type of the household head, and infrastructural dimensions like housing typology, and water connection are strongly related to food security. Through this work, we attempt to establish the baseline evidence on the current status of food security in Bengaluru, to lay the foundation for a future research agenda on urban food security in India.