"With the food problem looming so large, India has had to put increased agricultural production ahead of everything else... She needs not so much to bring more land under cultivation as to get more from the farm land she already has... Water is another problem. India's great rivers contain more than enough for her needs but at present only a small part of the flow is used. Only one-fifth of her farm land is regularly watered." (331)
I can't pretend to know much about Indian politics, nor its current stats on irrigation and farm production (the rest of this section goes into more specific details and figures), so I cannot comment on the changes in India since she wrote this book. I chose this passage because to showed to me how internationally focused Eleanor became after she left the White House. Most people know about her involvement in the UDHR and her general involvement of the UN, but Eleanor also traveled extensively. In the final few chapters of her autobiography, Eleanor comments on her travels and gives her opinions on what she saw. I found it remarkable how modern-sounding her critiques are, seeing as they were made over forty years ago. Like in the passage above, she identified specific problems for development: water, proper agricultural techniques, literacy, etc, rather than give general statements on how to help other nations.
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