Timeline of major famines in India during British rule

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{{Infobox famine

| name = Timeline of major famines in India during British rule

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| image = FaminesMapOfIndia1800-1885.jpg

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| caption = Map of famines in India between 1800 and 1878

| country = Company rule in India, British Raj

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| period = 1765–1947

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The timeline of major famines in India during British rule covers major famines on the Indian subcontinent from 1765 to 1947. The famines included here occurred both in the princely states (regions administered by Indian rulers), British India (regions administered either by the British East India Company from 1765 to 1857; or by the British Crown, in the British Raj, from 1858 to 1947) and Indian territories independent of British rule such as the Maratha Empire.

The year 1765 is chosen as the start year because that year the British East India Company, after its victory in the Battle of Buxar, was granted the Diwani (rights to land revenue) in the region of Bengal (although it would not directly administer Bengal until 1784 when it was granted the Nizamat, or control of law and order.) The year 1947 is the year in which the British Raj was dissolved and the new successor states of Dominion of India and Dominion of Pakistan were established. The eastern half of the Dominion of Pakistan would become the People's Republic of Bangladesh in 1971.

A "major famine" is defined according to a magnitude scale, which is an end-to-end assessment based on total excess death. According to it: (a) a minor famine is accompanied by less than 999 excess deaths); (b) a moderate famine by between 1,000 and 9,999 excess deaths; (c) a major famine by between 10,000 and 99,999 excess deaths; (d) a great famine by between 100,000 and 999,999 excess deaths; and (e) a catastrophic famine by more than 1 million excess deaths.{{citation|last=Rubin|first=Olivier|title=Contemporary Famine Analysis|series=Springer Briefs in Political Science|publisher=SpringerNature|year=2016|page=14|isbn=978-3-319-27304-4}}

The British era is significant because during this period a very large number of famines struck India.{{citation|last=Siegel|first=Benjamin Robert|title=Hungary Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India|page=6|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=2018|isbn=978-1-108-42596-4|quote=For nearly two centuries, India’s British administrators had presided over innumerous famines, each dismissed in turn as a Malthusian inevitability.}}{{citation|last=Simonow|first=Joanna|title=Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia|editor1-last= Fischer-Tiné |editor1-first=Harald|editor2-last=Framke|editor2-first=Maria|chapter=Famine relief in colonial South Asia, 1858–1947: Regional and global perspectives.|pages=497–509|location=London and New York|publisher=Routledge|year=2022|isbn=978-1-138-36484-4|quote= (p. 497–498) Famines and food scarcities of various degrees accompanied colonial rule in India. Only about a dozen of them have received scholarly attention. For long, this attention has been distributed rather unevenly, with literature on famines in the second half of the nineteenth century being more extensive than research dealing with famines in the early colonial period. But, with the growth of scholarly work on the latter, the balance is shifting.}} There is a vast literature on the famines in colonial British India.{{citation|last=Simonow|first=Joanna|title=Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia|editor1-last= Fischer-Tiné |editor1-first=Harald|editor2-last=Framke|editor2-first=Maria|chapter=Famine relief in colonial South Asia, 1858–1947: Regional and global perspectives.|pages=497–509|location=London and New York|publisher=Routledge|year=2022|isbn=978-1-138-36484-4|quote=(p. 510) Despite the copious literature on famines in colonial India, the history of famines still provides scholars of South Asia with new points of departure to deviate from common scales of analysis and to explore largely untouched primary sources}} The mortality in these famines was excessively high and in some may have been increased by British policies.{{citation|last=Earle|first=Rebecca|title=Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato|page=114|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=2020|isbn=978-1-108-48406-0|quote=Horrendous famines causing millions of deaths continued to scourge India’s inhabitants throughout the period of colonial rule. British policies proved utterly inadequate to the task of alleviating starvation and were in many cases directly responsible for it.}} The mortality in the Great Bengal famine of 1770 was between one and 10 million;{{Cite book|last=Datta|first=Rajat|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/44927255|title=Society, economy, and the market: commercialization in rural Bengal, c. 1760-1800|date=2000|publisher=Manohar Publishers & Distributors|isbn=81-7304-341-8|location=New Delhi|pages=262, 266|oclc=44927255}} the Chalisa famine of 1783–1784, 11 million; Doji bara famine of 1791–1792, 11 million; and Agra famine of 1837–1838, 800,000.{{citation|last=Simonow|first=Joanna|title=Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia|editor1-last= Fischer-Tiné |editor1-first=Harald|editor2-last=Framke|editor2-first=Maria|chapter=Famine relief in colonial South Asia, 1858–1947: Regional and global perspectives.|pages=497–509|location=London and New York|publisher=Routledge|year=2022|isbn=978-1-138-36484-4|quote= (p. 497–498) In 1769/70 famine conditions surfaced in Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar, resulting in the estimated death of 10 million Indians in Bengal alone – a third of the province’s population. Millions of Indians died of starvation in the south of India from 1781 to 1783, and a year later in north India as well because of the rapid succession of another major famine crisis. Droughts were frequent in the North-Western Provinces, in 1803/4, 1812/13, 1817–19, 1824–26, and 1833, often spilling over into severe subsistence crises. This spate of food crises anticipated the onset of yet another major famine in 1836/7, which threw the Doab region into havoc and caused the death of an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of the population.}} In the second half of the 19th-century large-scale excess mortality was caused by: Upper Doab famine of 1860–1861, 2 million; Great Famine of 1876–1878, 5.5 million; Indian famine of 1896–1897, 5 million; and Indian famine of 1899–1900, 1 million.{{citation|last=Simonow|first=Joanna|title=Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia|editor1-last= Fischer-Tiné |editor1-first=Harald|editor2-last=Framke|editor2-first=Maria|chapter=Famine relief in colonial South Asia, 1858–1947: Regional and global perspectives.|pages=497–509|location=London and New York|publisher=Routledge|year=2022|isbn=978-1-138-36484-4|quote= (p. 497–498) In the second half of the nineteenth-century famine conditions devastated Orissa in 1866/7 and ravaged the Madras Presidency, the Deccan region, and the North-Western Provinces from 1876 to 1878. Even greater in scope were the famines of 1896/7 and 1899/1900, which held almost the entire subcontinent in their grip. ... Mortality was excessive during these latter famine crises. Historians have estimated that between 12 and 29 million died between 1876 and 1902.}} The first major famine of the 20th century was the Bengal famine of 1943, which affected the Bengal region during wartime; it was one of the major South Asian famines in which anywhere between 1.5 million and 3 million people died.{{citation|last=Simonow|first=Joanna|title=Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia|editor1-last= Fischer-Tiné |editor1-first=Harald|editor2-last=Framke|editor2-first=Maria|chapter=Famine relief in colonial South Asia, 1858–1947: Regional and global perspectives.|pages=497–509|location=London and New York|publisher=Routledge|year=2022|isbn=978-1-138-36484-4|quote= (p. 497–498) Following the improvement of colonial mechanisms to identify and contain famine conditions, their scale decreased in the early twentieth century. Yet scarcities as well as outright famines continued to haunt India’s agriculturalists. They were particular frequent during and in the aftermath of both world wars, when the wars’ economic, social, and political repercussions increased the vulnerability of India’s agricultural labourers to subsistence crises.11 It was not until the great Bengal Famine of 1943/4, however, which resulted in the death of an estimated 3 million Bengalis and displaced even more, that mass starvation again resulted in horrific sights of emaciated bodies and corpses filling the streets of urban centres of British India.12 Following the worst South Asian famine of the twentieth century, the nation’s political elite prepared for independence even while the country remained on the brink of famine.}}

The era is significant also because it is the first period for which there is systematic documentation.{{citation|last=Roy|first=Tirthankar|author-link=Tirthankar Roy|page=3|title=Were Indian Famines 'Natural' Or 'Manmade?'|journal=London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History, Working Papers|issue=243|date=June 2016|url=https://www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-History/Assets/Documents/WorkingPapers/Economic-History/2016/WP243.pdf|quote=All of the three interpretations - geography, manmade-as-political, and manmade-as-cultural - have been prominent in the scholarship and popular history of past Indian famines, especially for the time when detailed records of famines were kept. This starts as recently as the mid-nineteenth century, though the occurrence of famines in India has a much longer history. The years for which some systematic documentation exist were also the years when more than half of India was ruled first by the British East India Company (until 1858), and then the British Crown (1858-1947).}} Major reports, such as the Report on the Upper Doab famine of 1860–1861 by Richard Baird Smith, those of the Indian Famine Commissions of 1880, 1897, and 1901 and the Famine Inquiry Commission of 1944, appeared during this period, as did the Indian Famine Codes.{{citation|last=Dreze|first=Jean|editor1-last=Dreze|editor1-first=Jean|editor2-last=Sen|editor2-first=Amartya|publisher=Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-828636-3|chapter=Famine Prevention in India|title=The Political Economy of Hunger, Volume 2: Famine Prevention|pages=13–122, 33|

quote=... an examination of the incidence of famines in India before and after the Famine Codes strongly suggests a contrast between the earlier period of famines and famine relief in India during the period on which this section will focus.
1770 Formidable famine in Bengal
1770-1858 Frequent and severe famines
1858 End of East India Company
1861 Report of Baird Smith on the 1860-1 famine
1861-80 Frequent and severe famines
1880 Famine Commission Report, followed by the introduction ofFamine Codes
1880-96 Very few famines
1896-7 Large-scale famine affecting large parts of India
1898 Famine Commission Report on the 1896—7 famine
1899-1900 Large-scale famine
1901 Famine Commission Report on the 1899-1900 famine
1901-43 Very few famines
1943 Bengal Famine
1945 Famine Commission Report on the Bengal Famine
1947 Independence}} These last, consolidating in the 1880s, were the first carefully considered system for the prediction of famine and the pre-emptive mitigation of its impact; the codes were to affect famine relief well into the 1970s.{{citation|last=Brennan|first=Lance|chapter=The Development of the Indian Famine Code|title=Famine as a Geographical Phenomenon|editor1-last=Currey|editor1-first=Bruce|editor2-last=Hugo|editor2-first=Graeme|publisher=D. Reidel Publishing Company; Kluwer Academic Publishers|location=Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster|isbn=978-94-009-6397-9|year=1984|pages=91–112, 92|quote=These codes were not, of course, the first sets of administrative instructions for famine relief. Outhwaite discusses the Book of Orders issued during sixteenth century famines in England (Outhwaite 1978), and there were codes issued during the 1876-79 period in some provinces as their governments grappled with widespread and prolonged food crises. But the codes produced in the 1880s do seem to have been the first serious attempts to systematize the prediction of famine, and to set down steps to ameliorate its impact before its onset. ... The codes which eventually emerged were the product of a complex process beginning with the experience of the famines of 1876-9, continuing through the investigations of the Famine Commission, and ending with the discussions of the 'draft', 'provisional', and final provincial codes. This exercise produced answers to the major questions of famine relief which, though not immutable, were to influence famine policy for the following ninety years. }} The Bengal famine of 1943, the last major famine of British India occurred in part because the authorities failed to take notice of the famine codes in wartime conditions.{{citation|last=Human Rights Watch|title=Individual Human Rights: The Relationship of Political and Civil Rights to Survival, Subsistence and Poverty|location=Washington DC, London, and Brussels|isbn=1-56432-084-7|lccn=92-74298|year=1992|publisher=Human Rights Watch|page=3|quote=Independence also came on the heels of a disastrous famine, that killed over one million people in Bengal in 1943. This famine occurred in part because the British authorities failed to implement the provisions of the famine code -- illustrating that the most sophisticated technical system is valueless unless it is used.}} The indignation caused by this famine accelerated the decolonization of British India.{{citation|last=Human Rights Watch|title=Individual Human Rights: The Relationship of Political and Civil Rights to Survival, Subsistence and Poverty|location=Washington DC, London, and Brussels|isbn=1-56432-084-7|lccn=92-74298|year=1992|publisher=Human Rights Watch|page=3|quote=The outrage caused by this famine intensified demands for immediate independence after the Second World War, and also ensured that a commitment to famine prevention would be at the top of the new government’s political priorities.}} It also impelled Indian nationalists to make food security an important post-independence goal.{{citation|last=Siegel|first=Benjamin Robert|title=Hungary Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India|page=6|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=2018|isbn=978-1-108-42596-4|quote=Hunger had begun to emerge as a site of political contestation in the decades before independence, but it was in the wake of the Bengal famine of 1943 that Indian nationalists tied the promise of independence to the guarantee of food for all, drawing upon novel critiques of India’s political economy.}}{{citation|last1=Spielman|first1=Katherine A.|last2=Aggarwal|first2=Rimjhim M|page=264|chapter=Household- vs. National-Scale Food Storage: Perspectives on Food Security from Archaeology and Contemporary India|title=Sustainability: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Tradeoffs|year=2017|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-1-107-07833-8|quote=The memory of famines during the British colonial period has strongly shaped the narrative, and consequently the mental model, that underlies the framing of food policy in India.}} After independence, the Dominion of India and thereafter the Republic of India inherited these codes, which were modernized and improved, and although there were severe food shortages in India after independence, and malnutrition continues to the present day, there were neither serious famines, nor clear and undisputed or large-scale ones.{{citation|last=Szirmai|first=Adam|title=Socio-Economic Development, 2nd edition|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=2015|orig-year=2005|page=418|isbn=978-1-107-04595-8|quote=If governments had imported limited amounts of food and taken responsibility for its distribution, prices could have been brought under control and famines could have been averted. Since independence in 1947, India has pursued such policies. Unlike what happened in China between 1958 and 1960, there have been no large-scale famines in India in the post-war period. A relatively open society and timely identification of food shortages are the prerequisites for success of a policy aimed at preventing famines.}}{{citation|last=Human Rights Watch|title=Individual Human Rights: The Relationship of Political and Civil Rights to Survival, Subsistence and Poverty|location=Washington DC, London, and Brussels|isbn=1-56432-084-7|lccn=92-74298|year=1992|publisher=Human Rights Watch|page=3|quote= India provides the best example of a country that has successfully averted famine since Independence in 1947, despite repeated droughts and enduring chronic poverty. ... Since 1947, the Famine Codes — now renamed Scarcity Manuals — have been continually updated and improved. Their provisions have frequently been implemented -- most notably in 1966, 1973 and 1987. In all cases, they have prevented severe food shortages from degenerating into famine.}}{{citation|last=Siegel|first=Benjamin Robert|title=Hungary Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India|page=6|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=2018|isbn=978-1-108-42596-4|quote=The independent nation has repeatedly defied gloomy predictions of outright famine. Yet India has remained in the thrall of pervasive malnutrition since independence, its citizens less food secure than those of any sub- Saharan African state.}}{{citation|last1=Spielman|first1=Katherine A.|last2=Aggarwal|first2=Rimjhim M|page=264|chapter=Household- vs. National-Scale Food Storage: Perspectives on Food Security from Archaeology and Contemporary India|title=Sustainability: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Tradeoffs|year=2017|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-1-107-07833-8|quote=Shortly after independence, the import of food (PL-480 packages from the United States) following the severe drought in the mid-1960s was seen as a tremendous embarrassment to the pride of a young nation. Consequently, emphasis was placed on maximizing national production of food by focusing on the most fertile regions of the country, and then distributing surplus food from these regions to those with food deficits through a centralized public distribution system. The green revolution in the late 196os/early 1970s accelerated agricultural growth at the national level and as Sen (1999) argues, 'Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition partics and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort.' In his opinion the establishment of a multi-party political system and a free press after independence were instrumental in preventing further famines in India.}}{{citation|last=Wood|first=Alan T.|title=Asian Democracy in World History|publisher=Routledge|series=Themes in World History|location=London and New York|year=2016|orig-year=2004|isbn=978-0-415-22942-5|page=39|quote=Famine in India was endemic during the years of British rule, and given the tripling of the Indian population since independence one might have expected famines to increase. Yet there has never been a serious famine in independent India. The presence of opposition parties and a free press has made the government far more responsive to local needs than it ever was under colonial or autocratic rule. One has only to contemplate the experience of China to appreciate the magnitude of this difference. There 30 million peasants died of starvation in the late 1950s and early 1960s — by far the greatest famine anywhere in the world at any time in history — as a direct resule of Mao Zedong’s failed Great Leap Forward. Indeed, this ability to prevent famine may be one of democracy’s greatest contributions. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has written that ‘no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy — be it economically rich (as in contemporary Western Europe or North America) or relatively poor (as in postindependence India, or Botswana, or Zimbabwe).’}} The economist Amartya Sen who won the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in part for his work on the economic mechanisms underlying famines, has stated in his 2009 book, The Idea of Justice:

Though Indian democracy has many imperfections, nevertheless the political incentives generated by it have been adequate to eliminate major famines right from the time of independence. The last substantial famine in India — the Bengal famine — occurred only four years before the Empire ended. The prevalence of famines, which had been a persistent feature of the long history of the British Indian Empire, ended abruptly with the establishment of a democracy after independence.{{citation|last=Sen|first=Amartya|author-link=Amartya Sen|title=The Idea of Justice|publisher=The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press|location=Cambridge, MA|year=2009|isbn=978-0-674-03613-0}}

Migration of indentured labourers from India to the British tropical colonies of Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad and Tobago, Surinam, Natal and British Guyana has been correlated to a large number of these famines.{{citation|last1=Brennan|first1=Lance|last2=McDonald|first2=John|last3=Schlomowitz|first3=Ralph|last4=Aker|first4=Eva|year=2013|location=New Delhi|chapter=Towards and anthropometric theory of Indians under British rule|title=Well-being in India: Studies in anthropometric history|pages=71–72|publisher=Readworthy|quote=The crucial methodological questions addressed in the regression analysis of cohorts of indentured workers in this paper is the effect of recruitment year on the pattern of change in height by birth cohort. In comparing recruits for Mauritius, Natal and Fiji, we have emphasized that varying recruitment conditions, besides long-term changes in disease and nutrition, influenced average height. ... The second and more general influence on recruiting patterns was the influence of famine. There were a number of substantial famines in India during the 19th century. Those which most affected the north Indian recruiting areas occurred in 1836–1836, 1866–1867, 1873–1874, 1878–1879, 1892, 1896–1897, 1899–1900.}}{{Citation | last = Roy | first = Tirthankar | title = The Economic History of India, 1857–1947, 2nd edition | year = 2006 | publisher = Oxford University Press| isbn = 0-19-568430-3|page=362}} The first famine of the British period, the Great Bengal famine of 1770, appears in work of the Bengali language novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee;{{Sfn|Peers|2006|p=47}}{{Sfn|Metcalf|Metcalf|2006|p=78}} the last famine of the British period, Bengal famine of 1943 appears in the work of the Indian film director, Satyajit Ray. The inadequate official response to the Great Famine of 1876–1878, led Allan Octavian Hume and William Wedderburn in 1883 to found the Indian National Congress,{{sfn|Hall-Matthews|2008|p=24}} the first nationalist movement in the British Empire in Asia and Africa.{{sfn|Marshall|2001|p=179}} Upon assumption of its leadership by Mahatma Gandhi in 1920, Congress was to secure India both independence and reconciliation.{{citation|last=Stein|first=Burton|author-link=Burton Stein|title=A History of India|page=297|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QY4zdTDwMAQC|year=2010|publisher=John Wiley & Sons|isbn=978-1-4443-2351-1|quote=Despite any whimsy in implementation, the clarity of Gandhi’s political vision and the skill with which he carried the reforms in 1920 provided the foundation for what was to follow: twenty-five years of stewardship over the freedom movement. He knew the hazards to be negotiated. The British must be brought to a point where they would abdicate their rule without terrible destruction, thus assuring that freedom was not an empty achievement. To accomplish this he had to devise means of a moral sort, able to inspire the disciplined participation of millions of Indians, and equal to compelling the British to grant freedom, if not willingly, at least with resignation. Gandhi found his means in non-violent satyagraha. He insisted that it was not a cowardly form of resistance; rather, it required the most determined kind of courage.}}{{citation|last1=Corbett|first1=Jim|last2=Elwin|first2=Verrier|last3=Ali|first3=Salim|title=Lives in the Wilderness: Three Classic Indian Autobiographies|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2004|quote= The transfer of power in India, Dr Radhakrishnan has said, 'was one of the greatest acts of reconciliation in human history.'}}