FAMINES

FAMINES Famines, defined as large-scale episodes of acute starvation, were a frequent occurrence in South Asia until the mid-twentieth century. In 1770 nearly a third of the population of Bengal died due to a famine. Around 1877 about 4 million lives were lost, mainly in Bombay and Madras presidencies. In 1896–1897, more than 5 million perished, and in 1943, more than a million died in Bengal's famine. The incidence of mass starvation leading to death diminished substantially in the post–World War II period. Devastations of such magnitude had long-term demographic, economic, social, and political consequences, raising two questions: Were famines in this region a product of natural disasters or the result of human agency? Why did famines disappear after 1943?

Although famines have a long history in the region, some of the best-documented episodes of famine in India occurred after British rule began. The 1769–1770 famine in Bengal occurred five years after British takeover of taxation rights in the province. That famine reportedly followed two years of erratic rainfall, but was clearly worsened by the ruthless efficiency of the new regime in collecting land taxes, and by a smallpox epidemic. The 1812–1813 famine in western India, which particularly affected the Kathiawar region, came in the wake of several years of crop losses attributed to attacks by locusts and rats. The legendary Guntur famine of 1832–1833 followed crop failure as well as excessive and uncertain levels of taxation on peasants. In at least three episodes in nineteenth-century western India—in 1819–1820 in Broach, 1820–1822 in Sind, and 1853 in Thana and Colaba—famines were caused by monsoon flooding and resultant crop loss. The 1865–1867 famine in coastal Orissa followed several seasons of erratic rainfall, but was worsened by the persistent refusal of the local administration to import food. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, major famines causing in excess of a million deaths occurred three times: 1876–1878, 1896–1897, and 1899–1900. In each case, there was a crop failure of unusual intensity in the Deccan plateau, possibly the most famine-prone region in India.

In the twentieth century, major famines were fewer. In 1907–1908, an extensive crop failure and epidemic threat was effectively tackled by state relief machinery. Food procurement for World War II, combined with a crop failure, caused perhaps the harshest famine of the twentieth century, the 1943 Bengal famine.

Causes: Food Availability and Entitlement

A section of the colonial bureaucracy believed that famines were expressions of a Malthusian imbalance between resources and population in the region, the impact of which colonial relief efforts helped mitigate. Whatever the merits of that view, an element of high risk was indeed intrinsic to the resource endowment of the region. The greater part of the Indian subcontinent combines three months of monsoon rains with extreme aridity the rest of the year, which dries up much of the surface water. The rains make growing one crop relatively easy, but growing another crop is dependent upon irrigation systems that need to harvest groundwater or to transport water from long distances and are, therefore, relatively expensive. The dependence on a natural supply of water increased the risk of crop failure, and single-cropping reduced security against the failure of the monsoon crop. El Niño–type disturbances of the tropical oceanic atmospheric systems could make rainfall more unpredictable. Sudden and large-scale scarcities of food, therefore, were potentially part of the cycle of India's agricultural production.

Nationalist critics of British colonialism in India believed the scale of mortality during the nineteenth-century famines resulted from imperial economic policies. The argument consisted of two parts, an assertion that the intensity of famines increased in the nineteenth century, and a belief that British trade and taxation policies were primarily responsible. Land taxes were believed to be too high. Food exports were believed to increase food shortages for the local population, while nonfood crop exports encouraged farmers to give up food production. Both factors raised food prices. The colonial administration answered these charges by arguing that in fact foreign trade stabilized prices, since exports increased in times of low prices, and fell in times of high prices. Recent research on this question has found support for the thesis that foreign trade did stabilize food availability and prices.

While both these perspectives identified mass starvation with absolute scarcity of food, more recently the relationship between food availability and starvation has been recast in the more general "entitlement" approach advanced by Amartya Sen. In this view, access to food depends on an individual's entitlement to food by means of direct production, market purchase, or gifts and transfers. It is possible to consider scenarios in which food supplies are adequate, but certain groups face large declines in market-based or transfer-based entitlements to food. Famines can be caused by the inability to buy food or a collapse of transfers, even as food availability does not fall. The Bengal famine of 1943, and perhaps several other "war famines" in India, seem to illustrate this view.

Consequences

Consistent with the predictions of the entitlement approach, the effect of famines varied according to livelihood, gender, and social status. Further, famines affected both livelihood and demographic patterns, and through these effects could delay a return to normal conditions even as the proximate cause of the famine disappeared.

Crop failures affected artisans and wage workers in the rural areas much harder than the peasants. The latter usually had some stocks of food. But laborers were unable to obtain food as soon as food prices increased, because money wages were poorly indexed. The association between food prices and famine mortality, therefore, was a strong one. The effect of food prices on the incidence of rural poverty persisted in the late twentieth century, even as famines or starvation deaths became less frequent. Artisan incomes too declined during famines, for households stopped buying anything other than food with the onset of a famine. The 1876 famine drove large numbers of rural laborers and hand-loom weavers of South India to enlist for emigration to British tropical colonies abroad. The 1896 and 1899 famines again encouraged permanent migration. Famines also affected land transfers between the poor and the richer peasants, but these effects are not well researched.

The two late nineteenth-century famines (1876–1878 and 1896–1898) had severe impacts on population growth rates. For example, almost the entire expected natural increment in population in Madras and Bombay presidencies between 1871 and 1881 was carried off by the excess mortality from 1876 to 1878. In both these episodes, the first few months after a harvest failure saw a rise in food prices, followed by a decrease in conceptions due to famine amenorrhea, and a rise in deaths. Deaths were more common among men, who left home in search of work, among children and the elderly, and among the lower castes. Short-distance migration increased during a famine, and caused severe health crises. Almost always, crop failure drove people to change diets and forage for food in the forests and commons. In the first few months of starvation, more fodders and seeds were consumed, and livestock mortality therefore increased. Toward the end of a famine, epidemic diseases claimed lives. Sustained malnutrition reduced biological resistance to smallpox, plague, cholera, pneumonia, and diarrhea, and left the population susceptible to malarial death. Ironically, the spread of malaria was sometimes attributed to waterlogging due to the construction of irrigation canals as part of famine relief measures. These demographic conditions, together with the shortage of livestock and seeds, made any return to normal cultivation difficult even as the rains came back. After a famine ended, the mean age at marriage for women declined somewhat, marital fertility and birth rates tended to rise above average, and death rates fell below average.

Famines also created social stresses. Food riots, burglaries and raids, mob violence, and the sale of children increased, causing a rush of convicts into the prisons. Ironically, prisons were the only places where food was easily available.

Famine Policy

In the early nineteenth century, the British East India Company left famine relief largely to the native princes. The very real prospect of famines had encouraged the construction of state granaries in pre-colonial India, which were used for relief purposes. Common measures to prevent the occurrence of famines included the building of irrigation tanks and canals. On a more limited scale, private and temple charity were also at work. However, both the granaries and the private systems were localized, whereas the incidence of starvation was widely dispersed.

In the second and the third quarters of the nineteenth century, a discourse emerged in administrative circles on the need for building irrigation works and for the restoration of disused tanks as insurance against future famines. However, a clear policy in this regard did not take shape until 1880–1881. There was resistance within the administration to expenditure on irrigation, which, it was felt, brought uncertain returns. State agency in relief, it was sometimes argued, interfered with the agency of the market in bringing food to the needy. The ferocity of the 1876 famine, brought home by a series of influential books and articles in English, reduced such resistance.

Between 1876 and 1896, a state relief infrastructure was put in place in British India. The main elements of the policy were relief camps, where starving persons could receive food in exchange for labor at public works projects, such as the construction of railways or irrigation canals. A Famine Insurance Fund was started in 1881, out of which relief-related expenditures were to be funded. The relief camp was not unknown in 1876, but its effectiveness during that episode was in serious dispute. Its scale was limited, the labor requirement was rarely enforced due to a shortage of supervisors, and entry was based on the degree of distress, which was hard to define and subject to abuse. By the end of the century, however, the relief camp was a well-established institution in Madras and Bombay presidencies, and could mobilize thousands of laborers for construction works. The Famine Commission of 1881 outlined the relief policy, and the provincial Famine Codes wrote detailed instructions for local administrations to follow. If the relief camps were efficient in mobilizing labor, they were not very effective in averting large-scale mortality. Many seekers of relief, such as the artisans, could not offer the kind of labor the camps wanted and paid for. Some did not want to eat the same food as others due to caste prejudices. Women often avoided the camps. The Famine Codes became progressively lengthier to accommodate this heterogeneity.

With the exception of the 1943 "war famine" in Bengal, famines causing large mortality more or less disappeared in twentieth-century India. The state relief system functioned much better. The spread of irrigation and multiple cropping stabilized food availability. In the interwar period, internal markets were efficient in carrying food from excess supply to shortage regions. Easier migration contributed to this process. The railway network, in facilitating these movements of goods and labor, had a mitigating impact. Along with market efficiency, there was a change in political attitudes. Free markets in food came to an end at about the time of World War II. The government during the war and subsequent governments in independent India controlled food trade. Exercise of state power in the former case led to a famine. Exercise of state power in the latter period prevented any recurrence.

Serious and large-scale erosion of access to food did recur in India briefly in 1966–1967, but had no significant impact on mortality. Starvation deaths, though rarer, continue to occur in parts of the arid zones poorly served by irrigation and transportation. While large-scale starvation deaths became less frequent in post-independence India, malnutrition has persisted.

Tirthankar Roy

See alsoEconomic Development, Importance of Institutions in and Social Aspects of ; Poverty and Inequality

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dyson, T. "The Demography of South Asian Famines." Population Studies 45, no. 1 (1991): 5–25, and 45, no. 2: 279–297.

McAlpin, M. B. Subject to Famine: Food Crises and Economic Change in Western India, 1860–1920. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Report of the Indian Famine Commission. Part III: Famine Histories. London: Indian Famine Commission, 1885.

Sen, A. K. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.

Visaria, L., and P. Visaria. "Population (1757–1947)." In The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2: c.1757–c.1970, edited by Dharma Kumar. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983.