User:Lingzhi/misc


 * weigold speaks to inflation
 * greenough general inflation 102 103
 * It may be added here that the price of officially 'controlled' rice was Rs.9 a bag; mentioned in People's War 25/4/1943.	3518014.txt
 * Over the 19th and early 20th century, Bengal's main crops were rice and jute. The cultivation of rice, especially in the valued ??man variety, required great care and intense labour for 2/3 of the year, while jute left more scope for winter crops like pulses and mustard. Being a cash crop, jute was often cultivated by farmers in direct proportions to their indebtedness, but its price was subject to variations on the international markets, which were totally beyond the control of the Bengali peasant. Agriculture was therefore a sufficiently elastic activity to permit other economic enterprises. The number of persons engaged in cattle-breeding, however, was significantly small. Again, water buffalo was naturally preferred to cow. This is not a marginal aspect of Bengal's	41913060.txt
 * regarding grain storage was rejected by the majority on the commission, and intervention with the free market via price control or government storage and distribution of grain remained "anathema" to the British administration in the decades that followed. Nevertheless, the claim that the state was indeed responsible for preventing starvation deaths during a famine did lead to significant changes. The backbone of the relief strategy laid out in the Famine Codes, writes Jean Dr??ze, was the organization of massive public works expected to provide "employment at subsistence wages and at a reasonable distance from their homes to all who applied for it," as well as gratuitous relief for those unable to work.	24.1.edgerton-tarpley.txt
 * , and (principally in the eastern districts) an increasingly monetized economy, tied to international markets, that was vulnerable to hyperinflation
 * Different districts in Bengal were affected by famine at different times and to considerably different degrees. The government of India dated the beginning of a "food crisis" to the consequences of the air raids on Calcutta of December 1942, and the beginning of "famine" to May 1943, as the consequence of decontrol of rice prices two months earlier.
 * Rice prices, increasing since the outset of the war, rose sharply and steadily through 1941 and 1942, then skyrocketed in 1943. These sudden leaps in the price of rice compounded existing wartime inflationary pressures throughout the economy, placing not only rice but also cloth and other commodities and products in Bengal beyond the reach of several segments of the population, particularly the rural poor.
 * The government was slow to respond with humanitarian aid, at first relying on propaganda against hoarding. It attempted to bring rice paddy prices down through price controls and a series of procurement schemes. Price controls merely created a thriving black market and encouraged cautious sellers to withhold stocks; moreover, prices soared when the controls were abandoned.Rice prices, increasing since the outset of the war, had risen by nearly 75% by December 1941. Rice reached double its normal price levels in August 1942 and triple by December, followed by "massive escalation" in 1943. This "sudden and violent inflationary turn" in the price of rice compounded existing wartime inflationary pressures throughout the economy, placing not only rice but also cloth and other commodities and products in Bengal beyond the reach of several segments of the population, particularly the rural poor.


 * The demand for rice was pushed up by increased exports, panic buying, commodity market speculation, and an influx of refugees and military personnel. At the same time, supplies of rice and other foodgrains were disrupted by ecological shocks, the Japanese occupation of Burma (modern Myanmar), domestic trade barriers,unwilling sellers, and perhaps profiteering. These problems were compounded by wartime inflation; a precarious balance between land ownership, agricultural productivity and demographic pressures; near-total disruption of Bengal's market supplies and transport systems by preemptive, defensive scorched earth policies the UK government carried out to deter potential Japanese invasion, and the ineffective use of price controls.


 * as a sharp drop in food supply due to cataclysmic crop failure; as war-time, inflation-driven market failure; as market dislocations caused by an overwhelmed government in disarray committing a series of panicky and bungling policy failures; or as victimization of the poor of Bengal by profiteering grain traders and the "wartime priorities of the ruling colonial elite".
 * Hardest hit economically were women and landless agricultural laborers; in relative terms, laborers in rural trade, fishing and transport suffered most. Uncounted thousands wandered from rural areas to cities in search of food, and fell prey to disease and death. The loss of life was so severe that rural areas of Bengal were described as "a vast cremation ground" where "bodies in all states of decay ... [were] dragged through the lanes of abandoned villages by hungry jackals".




 * borders, hoarders, prices and control, epidemics, distress sales, mortality,
 * Missing rice prices
 * Wrap up inter-provincial trade barriers
 * Missing crop production (shortfall)
 * Wrap up refusal of imports
 * Missing distress sales of land
 * Missing epidemics
 * Missing exports
 * Missing long-term effects
 * Missing mortality rates
 * Wrap up debate over cause
 * Missing state interventions and relief

Initial public policy was based on the presumption of hoarding by merchants, producers, and consumers Contemporary commentators believed that there was substantial hoarding by those consumers who could afford it, by firms and by those farmers who produced surpluses.... An official ‘Food Drive’ in Bengal did not result in release of hoarded stocks. "In his analysis of the provincial government's response to the problems of the rice trade following the British defeat in Burma, Paul Greenough (1982: 98-126) points out that the initial move of imposing a maximum price of Rs 5/12 when the market price was Rs 8, drove rice from the market, encouraged a black market, and introduced into the grain trade a range of speculators who would carry the price to much greater heights in the future. More importantly this action and the appropriation of rice stocks in late December 1942 to meet the crisis in Calcutta caused by Japanese bombing, broke the confidence of the rice traders in the government and in the predictability of its actions.Brennan1984"

"Famine was not declared, according to the Revenue Department, because until June its strategy was based on the belief that grain would become available through the central government and this dictated a policy of "creating confidence." After June it was not confident that the central government would supply either the grain or the funds to meet the "extraordinary obligations for relief." In these circumstances it claimed it would have been useless to declare a famine. The underlying reality was that it believed that more available money would aggravate the supply situation (GBR 1944:1-2)."

"3) The third part of the sequence has been dealt with above only in the case of Bengal in 1943 - four years before the end of the Raj. The British at this time had their backs to the wall, and financed the war in Burma by inflationary methods which, in the context of the fall of Burma, inevitably increased the price of grain and channelled much of the surplus grain in Bengal into Calcutta. Having done this the government attempted to regulate the price of grain by decree — the failure of which demonstrated its weakness.Brennan1984"


 * and the authorities worried about the military implications of declaring a famine (Henry Knight 1954; Sen 1981; Greenough 1982; Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper 2005).ogradac_article_pub_063

"By December of 1943 it was apparent that the all-important aman crop, harvested in late autumn, would be a bumper crop. With London's continued refusal of imports, this promising aman yield, above all else, was being counted on to relieve famine. The new Viceroy, Field Marshall Archibald Wavell had also managed to implement an extensive and efficient military relief operation, almost overnight. Major-General Stuart (in over-all charge of military assistance) had, at his command, twelve to fifteen thousand British troops to aid relief operations, and Major-General Wakely (in charge of movements) was given considerable transportation priority to move rice out of Calcutta and into the districts. Although the official line was still that famine had been precipitated by the hoarding of cultivators, orders were passed that seemed to belie a less perfunctory understanding of the causes of famine. The export of rice and paddy from Bengal was strictly prohibited early in December.3 Direct purchases from large industrial firms were banned,4 and a ban was also levied on the movement of rice and paddy out of 12 principle rice-growing districts. Perhaps most importantly of all, the Central Government in New Delhi committed itself to feed Calcutta through direct imports from outside of Bengal.5 These measures, combined, would take immense pressure off the countryside, which was suffering incalculable misery at the expense of Calcutta."

"Raj's boon to India, was not invoked.57 The Governor's claim that the government simply did not have the food to give the prescribed ration must be viewed in the light of the colonial state's sense of priorities. Famine relief that was undertaken by the [] from August 1943 to supplement private efforts already underway proved inept and inadequate. As Amartya Sen has pointed out, even if a famine is not caused by food availability decline, large injections of food into the public distribution system would be needed in order to break it.58 The government of India were unable to impress upon London the desperate need for external supplies. The famine was not even officially acknowledged in the British Parliament until October 1943. As for Subhas S. Bose's request of safe passage for ships carrying rice across the Bay of Bengal from Burma in the autumn of 1943, the offer was not formally rejected but just nervously suppressed.59"

"The basic plan was contemplated sending an agreed total of nearly 3,70,000 tons of rice to Bengal over a period of a year to be received from December 1942. Actually in the 7 months from December 1942 to June 1943 only a little over 44,000 tons reached Bengal...the most glaring discrepancy is in the case of Bihar whence 1,85,000 tons were promised and we have received only about 1,000 tons."

"the prohibition of export of cereals in general and of rice in particular from each province, which had come into operation during 1942 with the consent of the government of India, prevented the price spiral in Bengal being broken by imports from the other provinces. After much fumbling with various all-India schemes of food distribution, the government of India eventually ordered free trade in the eastern region of the country towards the middle of May 1943. But this was abandoned in July, since the prices in these neighbouring provinces soon reached the 'maximum' levels laid down by the provincial governments. A 'Basic Plan' of centralised inter-state grain movements eventually came into operation in late summer, improving the supply position in Bengal in the last quarter of 1943."

"On May 18th the Government of India announced its own "free trade" policy. Heeding the demands made by the Government of Bengal, they abrogated the "Basic Plan," which had established Government of India control over inter-provincial trade in food grains. All trade [barrier]s between Bengal and its neighboring provinces of Bihar, Orissa, and Assam were abolished overnight, and as such the order effectively relinquished the last vestige of central authority (or accountability) over the food supply of India. The results of the order were predictable. "The introduction of free trade," as Famine Enquiry Commission found, "led immediately to the invasion of the provinces of Bihar, Orissa and Assam by a large army of purchasers from Bengal ."203 Conditions in Bengal were replicated in microcosm, as the mania to feed Calcutta destabilized large regions of the peripheral countryside. Prices in Bihar and Orissa shot up immediately, while in Calcutta only a transitory dip in prices was registered. The Government of Bihar lodged an angry protest. "Bengal merchants or their agents," they charged, "went into the interior villages and offered fantastic prices, as a result of which the arrivals of supplies in local markets were extremely poor [and] prices fluctuated almost from hour to hour due to wild speculation."204 In Orissa the consequences were similar. According to the provincial Government: "it was undoubtedly the greatest factor in causing high prices, hoarding and the un-availability of foodgrains to consumers in the later part of 1943."205 In short, the Government of India's experiment had confirmed that the policies adopted in Bengal some months earlier, were just as "effective" everywhere. Meanwhile, growing provincial distrust only isolated Bengal further in its plight."

"Barriers continued to be put up. In March 1942, the Central Provinces, after a scramble for rice, had stopped export of foodgrains to places outside the province. The Government of India had in some cases issued directions against such steps. When the Food Production Conference met in April 1942 the question of barriers came up for a good deal of discussion. IARIHDD8-001362"

"...interprovince movements of grain were largely prohibited except through intergovernmental agreements that did not get organized until after the famine"

- Sen_availability_81

"In February 1943 Pinnell reported to the Second Food Conference in Delhi that there was 20 per cent failure of rice crops in Bengal, with the possibility of crop diseases more serious than the ones that were detected after the onslaught of the cyclone and floods.60 He was echoing the view of the director-general of food supplies, who warned the central government in November 1942 of very serious consequences if they did not respond to the danger of a famine. The officials in Delhi also ignored censorship reports from East Bengal released by the provincial government from March 1943 that warned of an impending famine. A joint memorandum released by the district officials in Bengal on 9 April 1943 stated that villagers, cultivators, traders and jotedars (tenure-holders) had all predicted very serious shortage of rice and other goods.61 60 GOI, Letter No. G-IV (28)/43, 13 April 1943. 61 BL, OIOC, IOR, Mss.Eur.D.792, H.B.L. Braund Papers, Braund (1941: 28–30). 62 Ibid., p. 31."

"1943, taking carry-over and the likely size of the aus harvest (harvested during the summer months) into account, was only one million tons. In normal times, Bengal might have been resilient enough to cope with such a shortfall; in 1943, given military requirements and war-related disruption to trade and communications, this was a disastrous deficit. Informed commentary at the time, the failure of the food drive, and the high incidence of forced land sales by starving peasants all point to a deficit."

"Starvation and exchange entitlements evident till now, its results will persist As was noted earlier, not a single piece of serious statistical evidence exists on the 'carry-over', and a study of the moving averages of availability, taking note of production and net imports, suggests no reason for presuming a sharp decline of carry-over"

The normal carryover stocks did not exist in Bengal, because 1941 was a short year, and people started eating the December 1941 crop as soon as it was harvested (as they certainly did when the December 1943 crop was harvested). As a result, the good December 1941 crop did not mean the normal surplus stocks were carried over into 1943. In other years and in other provinces, there had been several good or average crops between bad years, and stocks had built up. meant there was no carry-over of rice into the first quarter of the next year, so a favorable harvest in early months of 1942 was consumed soon after it was gathered. "Before the war a comparatively small and diminishing exportable surplus of wheat was offset by a large and increasing import of rice. In pre-War years India's dependence upon rice imports was progressively increasing" minutes by hussain 181

"Sen acknowledges that no concrete [carryover data] exist but argues that his harvest data and his calculations of successive two- and three-year averages prove that the peasants had a substantial carryover and outweigh any contrary evidence.54 He specifically dismisses the analysis by Afzal Husain, a member of the FIC, as a "surmise." Husain wrote a long study included in the FIC report that employs different assumptions and utilizes much more data than Sen used to estimate the carryover.55 By the 1930s, according to Husain, Bengal was already a deficit province, dependent on imports from other provinces and Burma for its margin of subsistence, a point with which Greenough agrees and which Sen does not address.56 The partial crop failure in 1940-1941 had already depleted most reserves, Husain argues, and most people began eating the rice crop of 1941-42 in January 1942, rather than in April as was customary. Bengalis thus had no substantial carryover and by eating the new harvest early were reducing their reserves for the end of the year. By the end of 1942, Husain argues, the remainder of the 1941-1942 harvest was mostly consumed, and people again began eating the new harvest immediately.57 Goswami's recalculation showing a significant harvest decline, and Padmanabhan's evidence of small harvests in 1942 conclusively support Husain's views."

"In February 1943 Pinnell reported to the Second Food Conference in Delhi that there was 20 per cent failure of rice crops in Bengal, with the possibility of crop diseases more serious than the ones that were detected after the onslaught of the cyclone and floods.60 He was echoing the view of the director-general of food supplies, who warned the central government in November 1942 of very serious consequences if they did not respond to the danger of a famine. The officials in Delhi also ignored censorship reports from East Bengal released by the provincial government from March 1943 that warned of an impending famine. A joint memorandum released by the district officials in Bengal on 9 April 1943 stated that villagers, cultivators, traders and jotedars (tenure-holders) had all predicted very serious shortage of rice and other goods.61 60 GOI, Letter No. G-IV (28)/43, 13 April 1943. 61 BL, OIOC, IOR, Mss.Eur.D.792, H.B.L. Braund Papers, Braund (1941: 28–30). 62 Ibid., p. 31."

Moreover, pro-Congress factions in Midnapore, with a decades-long history of being particularly well-organized, set up a highly organized and sophisticated parallel 'National Government' (Jatiya Sarkar) in Contai and Tamluk that among other things distributed cyclone relief more ably (and with more goodwill and trust from the local populace) than the Indian government. imported through Calcutta (Chattopadhyay 1981: 137) and there would have been further imports into Chittagong and other East Begal ports. But it was less the amount of grain imported than the ease of importation of Burma rice into the markets of Calcutta that kept the Bengal rice price down. In 1942-3 on the other hand Burma was under the control of the Japanese. But even with these qualifications taken into account, the general shortfall of the rice harvest was only one among a number of factors at work in the situation. A crucial factor, which the Famine Inquiry Commission (FIC) ignored, was the inflation brought about by the method of financing the war agreed to by the British and Indian Govern- ments. In this the Indian Government paid for the peacetime level of defence forces adjusted for inflation, while the British Government paid for anything extra — but after the war. The wartime expenditure in India was funded by deficit financing, entirely for the British component and partly for the Indian component. This deficit grew sharply from 1940, and with it grew the money supply: Year ending Deficit  Money Supply March Million rupees  Billions of rupees 1940 100  5.3  1940-41 1941  577  5.3  1941-42 1942  2872  11.9  1942-43 1944  5903  16.1  1943-44 (Adapted from Chattopadhyay 1981:128-29) It is clear from the table that the situation in 1941 was not complicated by the degree of inflation generated in 1943. As well as the general impact of the inflation on the prices of manufactured goods (which were in short supply anyway) the increase in the money supply had a differentiated regional impact in Bengal. Most of the deficit was used on munitions and war supplies (Sinha and Khera 1962: 349-50) and much of these were produced in Calcutta and its environs. Calcutta was, therefore, not only the most important military production base in India, but also the recipient, through war-contracts, of a vast flow of money into its industrial sector. {[highlight|In these circumstances the manufacturers .were well placed to buy food at prices above the controlled rate and to provide it to their workers at reasonable prices (FIC 1945:63-4). The government was happy to agree to this arrangement as it would keep up war-production and reduce the likelihood of strikes, which had troubled Calcutta in 1943 (ECO 1943: 91). It was also the mechanism which would drain Bengal to feed Calcutta. In his analysis of the provincial government's response to the problems of the rice trade following the British defeat in Burma, Paul Greenough (1982: 98-126) points out that the initial move of imposing a maximum price of Rs 5/12 when the market price was Rs 8, drove rice from the market, encouraged a black market, and introduced into the grain trade a range of speculators who would carry the price to much greater heights in the future. More importantly this action and the appropriation of rice stocks in late December 1942 to meet the crisis in Calcutta caused by Japanese bombing, broke the confidence of the rice traders in the government and in the predictability of its actions.}} The Bengal rice trade was a very complex structure, with much of its activity based on credit and on personal relationships. Without confidence in government action there were limits to its ability to function efficiently — especially in an inflationary situation

13 "The cyclone severely damaged communications already disrupted by the government's boat denial] policy' and by sabotage during the rebellion. It was two days before officials began moving through the area discovering the extent of the damage. The delays in bringing in relief-a week passed before the first boatload of food, water, and medicine arrived from Calcutta..."

where manufacturers in Calcutta were prepared to meet high food costs to keep their factories running (Greenough, 1982: 113). The temptation to profiteer ay well have become irresistible when government policy changed as rapidly between control and decontrol as it did in the first half of 1943. The government was not equipped to provide relief in the situation which obtained in 1943. On one hand it tried to procure grain to send to areas where shortage was most pronounced (and did not have enough grain to do this properly until the 1943-4 winter harvest): on the other it provided agricultural loans, work relief, and gratuitous relief to the distressed (but in cash rather than food). This meant that the distressed often competed with those better placed for the stocks available or sent into the districts. This contradiction was symptomatic of the failure of the government to bring together the two departments responsible for fighting the famine (Brennan 1984b: 6). There was panic purchasing and hoarding among those consumers with the resources to meet the costs: there was a reluctance to sell by those producers who could afford not to part with all their crop. To a large extent the causation of the 1943 famine in Bengal lay at the provincial level, but there were also factors evident at the national level because the Government of India moved only slowly to assist Bengal with alternative grains and transport and logistical facilities. The rapid impact of army support on food supplies after Lord Wavell had ordered it to assist the provincial government in October 1943, pointed up what could have been done some two months before when wheat finally became available from the Punjab only to be held up in the Calcutta goods yards. Notwithstanding the primary importance of provincial and national level factors, the famine occurred in the districts and some of these were affected more than others. There; appears to have been two sets of districts in which the famine was more severe (FIC 1945: 112-15). First, those where a deficit in the production of rice was normally met by sales of jute. But in 1943 the wholesale price of jute was low at an average (on index terms) of 130 on a base of 100 -1914, against cereals, 397 (Chattopadhyay 1981: 141), and the boat 'denial' policies of the government in 1942 had destroyed the usual transport facilities of these districts. The second set of districts to be affected was that which had suffered a natural calamity. One of these was Rangpur. "[Jotedars], a section of the richer peasants or village oligarchy... sustained patron-client relationships and socially reproduced and exercised power over the vast majority of the subordinate peasantry by extending credit and market facilities... instead of investing in capitalist farming, [they] perpetuated the system's grip on the vast rural mass as creditors, traders and rentiers, which resulted in rural stagnation.""

Did natural forces destroy the rice crop, or did man-made forces destroy the rice market? Debate hinges on the issues of when the nature and scope of the disaster were recognized and whether enough food was available at the provincial or national level (or via international food aid arranged by Great Britain) to feed the the population of Bengal. "to change his tune. By mid-July he was demanding food imports as a matter of extreme urgency, no matter 'how unpalatable this demand must be to H.M.G.' and realizing its 'serious potential effect on military operations'. On the verge of retirement, he hoped that he could announce imminent food imports in his valedictory address to the New Delhi legislature. Amery, now also convinced that disaster was looming, took Linlithgow's plea seriously and argued the case at a meeting of the war cabinet on 31st July. Relying on military rather than humanitarian rhetoric, he advised that unless help was forthcoming, India's role as a theatre of war would be seriously compromised.32 However, the war cabinet held, against all the evidence, that 'the shortage of grain in India was not the result of physical deficiency but of hoarding', and insisted that the importation of grain would not solve the problem. Amery pleaded in vain with them to reject the position of the Minister for War Transport, who offered merely 100,000 tons of Iraqi barley and 'no more than 50,000 tons as a token shipment...to be ordered to Colombo to await instructions there'. Ministers hoped that on the strength of this measly offer but 'without disclosing figures' the Viceroy would announce that supplies were on their way as required. Amery conceded that he 'might be compelled by events to reopen the matter within a very few weeks'.33 Just a week later, General Auchinleck, commander-in-chief of British forces in India, echoing Amery's request, pleaded with the chief of imperial general staff in London: 'so far as shipping is concerned, the import of food is to my mind just as if not more important than the import of munitions'.34 To no"

"The secretary for state for India, Leo Amery, now began to listen and to argue the case at the war cabinet. The head of British forces in India, echoing Amery's request, pleaded with London that 'so far as shipping is concerned, the import of food is to my mind just as if not more important than the import of munitions'. But to no avail. Another rebuff by the war cabinet prompted Amery to muse in his diary that 'Winston [Churchill] may be right in saying that the starvation of anyhow under-fed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks, at any rate from the war point of view, but he makes no sufficient allowance for the sense of Empire responsibility in this country'. Although in mid-October Amery was still referring in public only to 'scarcity verging on famine', in private he knew that the game was up. Churchill's lack of empathy for India did not help; his immediate reaction to Amery's last-ditch plea for more shipping was 'a preliminary flourish on Indians breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us for doing nothing about the war'."

"In early September Amery was informed by Lord Leathers that he had "an actual deficiency of ships" for the operational plan prepared by the military and approved by cabinet. A few days later, General Claude Auchinleck, head of British forces in India, echoing Amery's request, pleaded with the chief of imperial general staff in London that "so far as shipping is concerned, the import of food is to my mind just as if not more important than the import of munitions."51 The shifting stance of The Economist on this issue of shipping is also worth noting. At the end of January 1943 it had resisted demands to divert food and ships to India: "Clearly, the best way to end the famine is speedy victory, and, however hard the decision, food ships must come second to victory ships. . . . But once the 'unconditional surrender' of the Axis has been achieved, the food ships must be sent in with the least possible delay." However, at the end of October The Economist's tune was a different one: "Mr Amery claims that 'substantial' quantities of shipping were allotted to take food to India early this year; but nothing that is known, by the"

"An estimate of'shortage of rice' was made in December 1942, taking full note of 'loss of Burma rice, floods in Sind, cyclones in rice growing areas of Bengal and Orissa and an indifferent rice crop generally in Bengal'.f But the shortage seemed absorbable, and the Indian government used this 'rice shortage' estimate only to supplement its request to London for shipping allocation to meet the existing 'wheat shortage', viz. shipping facilities to import 'an additional 600,000 tons of wheat'4 In his 'memorandum' on this request, the Secretary of State for India observed : 'No account is taken in it of the statistical shortage of 140,000 tons of rice and 650,000 tons of millets which is the back ground against which the Government of India have to view their wheat difficulties."

"These shortages, serious as they are, would not from the statistical standpoint bear a catastrophic proportion of the Indian cereal crop of 60/70 million tons.' While taking an essentially FAD approach, this detailed memorandum also went into 'aggravating factors', particularly the problems of the urban population, who 'are dependent on the marketed part of the crop, who are the first to experience any shortage and ... on whose labour the Indian munitions and supply industries depend'. The distress of the rural population, especially of agricultural labour, arising from shifting exchange entitlements, which... had already been quite substantial by then, was not noted. The reference to 'distribution' was only in the context of 'the strain put upon the railways by military and other loadings', f (The tendency to view 'distribution' essentially as a transport problem rather than as one involving purchasing power and exchange was, incidentally, a persistent feature of official thinking on the subject.' jf) As it happens, even the request for permission to import 600,000 tons of wheat was turned down in London on 16 January, only a small part of it being met. This was received, it appears, with equanimity, since the government itself did not take its t Document no. 265 in Mansergh (1971), p. 357; italics added. Note that the rice crop in Bengal was recognised to be 'indifferent' rather than exceptionally bad (cf. section 3 above)."

"See the Secretary of State's telegram to the Viceroy on 16 January 1943, Document no. 350 in Mansergh (1971), pp. 514-515. London continued to turn down requests by the government of India for shipping allocations throughout 1943; see Documents nos. 59, 71, 72, 74, 98, 139, 157, 207, 219 in Mansergh (1973), and also Wavell (1973), chs. 2 and 3."

"When Viscount Archibald Wavell took over as Viceroy during fall 1943, he recognized that the famine was more serious than Linlithgow realized because he decided it was the result of a large shortage, and he criticized the War Cabinet for working from manifestly false statistics that underestimated the shortage.109 He too sent insistent demands to the War Cabinet asking for a million tons of grain, and again he was put off for months and then offered a small fraction of what he requested until the wartime situation stabilized."

The Famine Inquiry Commission further summed the impact of forced migration on the fabric of society: "Camps constructed for evacuation in the event of air raids were available outside Calcutta, but these lay mostly to the north, whereas the great majority of destitutes came from the south. New camps had, therefore, to be established aTld the usual obstacles imposed by lack of transport and shortage of materials circumvented. Operations in Calcutta were hindered by the weak and diseased state of the famine-stricken population and their reluctance to enter Government institutions. Malicious rumours were spread about the motives of Government in collecting the destitutes. Further, the destitutes had acquired a "wandering habit" and resented confinement in ·camps. Many, placed under control, absconded if opportunity occurred. The peculiar mental condition induced by lack of food,"

- IARIHDD8-001362

"migration...has complex links with famine and mortality. Distress migration during famine can rightly be viewed as both an important survival strategy and a process which may actually increase the risks of death. Moreover, the ambiguity of the relationship between migration and mortality in circumstances of famine pertains not only to those who migrate, but to those who stay behind. Thus the stark distinction... may partly relate to differences in communication and integration. The contrast may, therefore, be between... a state with a trivial urban sector, a poorly developed transport system, bisected north from south by a major river, where people basically died where they lived — and... a more extensive communications system and much larger urban sector probably both redistributed, and helped limit, the volume of excess deaths."

"A 'no FAD' interpretation of the Bengali famine implies that it was akin to a zero-sum game, with the shift in the relative price of food distinguishing winners from losers. The main losers in Bengal—unskilled workers, petty artisans, landless farm laborers, and their dependents—were no different than those most at risk during famines generally; but evidence that food producers and speculators in stocks of food made comparable gains seems doubtful. Sen and others have described the famine as the product mainly of bureaucratic bungling and accompanying market failure. I see it instead as largely due to the failure of the British authorities to make good, for war-strategic reasons, a genuine food deficit." Food prices increased throughout India, and the Central Government was forced to undertake meetings with local government officials and release regulations of price controls Food prices were high in mid-1942, reflecting the belief that India was in deficit. They rose sharply when the cyclone destroyed a quarter of Bengal's rice crop, and evidence of shortage elsewhere in India and elsewhere in the region emerged, and they continued to rise sharply as the famine bit. Repeated efforts to 'break the Calcutta market' and reduce prices by dumping grain on the market failed: the quantities of grain available for intervention were minuscule in relation to the shortage.

This process, known as subinfeudation"The term "entitlement" is used in this context to mean something wholly different than that of entitlements in U.S. politics. The original definition by Amartya Sen was essentially the legal means to acquire food ; following and, this has generally been expanded in later literature to include socially and morally binding claims on the food supply."

"Contrary to the... view of a jotedar-bargadar dichotomy in Bengal, big jotedars cultivating substantial lands through dependent sharecroppers were to be found only in northern Bengal and in the Sunderbans in the south where large credit advances from rich, enterprising farmers had been required to clear the scrub and jungle for cultivation during the nineteenth century."

Traditional zamindar landlords had existed since before the Mughal Empire, and had held power by controlling land (without a formal market for real estate) and attracting followers. After the Permanent Settlement, land became a commodity. The role of zamidars was redefined; they were given the legal right, inheritable by descendants, to collect taxes over  areas of land encompassing several or many villages, whether or not they actually owned those lands. Crucially they were responsible for paying taxes/tribute to the British Empire. They sometimes owned the large tracts of land from which they extracted rent, but in other cases owned only personal land around their home village. Jotedars, in contrast, typically owned a large proportion of the land in and around their home village, which established their power base, but in other  cases they merely rented these lands from zamindari: "The rural scene in Bengal... [comprised] two distinct structures of land tenure: the tribute-collecting structure over the village [that is, the zamindars] and the land-holding structure within the village [that is, the jotedars]."

"As a matter of fact, both the framers and the critics of the Permanent Settlement failed to make a pertinent distinction, in speaking of landlords in the Indian context, between (a) the various grades of hereditary revenue-collectors with proprietary rights in revenue management and (b) the dominant landed village groups in effective possession of land and commanding the labour of poor villagers. Failure to make this distinction led the framers of the Permanent Settlement to confer proprietary rights in land to a class of men who as a rule did not have land in their actual possession and were entitled merely to collect tribute and pay a part thereof as revenue to the government. The critics of the Permanent Settlement were led, on the other hand, to deny the existence of proprietors of land, although there existed in Bengal, as tenants of the revenue-collecting zamindars and taluqdars, a class of men known as jotedars who owned sizeable portions of village lands and cultivated their broad acres with the help of share-croppers, tenants-at-will and hired labourers. The rural scene in Bengal, before as well as after the Permanent Settlement, cannot be analyzed without reference to two distinct structures of land tenure: the tribute-collecting structure over the village and the land-holding structure within the village."

"Indian officials were in the best position to understand and manipulate the new situation. They knew how the courts worked, because they worked in them. They knew which estates were valuable, because they kept the records and collected the taxes. Many of them acquired capital quickly through bribery and corruption. It became a simple matter for them legally or fraudulently to bring to auction those estates which were valuable because underassessed, and to acquire them for themselves."

{{quote|What otherwise could have been an apalling process of subinfeudation was arrested by the growing tendency among the jotedars and the categories of settled tenants of not admitting and settling any more tenants by legal subleasing but to get their lands cultivated on. ad hi (sharecropping) basis {ibid., 73-76: cf Gruning, 1911:83 84).23619142}} "Under the old local system, land had been the basis of power; with land one could provide for followers. Once land became a commodity, power came to be based on economic considerations. Followers were not as important as income for the basis of social status."

"The Indian Famine Inquiry Commission (1945) later stressed the indispensability of the moneylender in the rural economic system in normal times, and suggested that the controls had led to a more limited supply of credit during the crisis. While the moneylenders charged high annual rates – 50 to 100 per cent was the norm in Bengal before the famine—they supplied the seasonal loans and working capital that were indispensable to smallholders. The legislation constrained moneylenders without solving the problems which created the demand for them."

Subinfeudation
'And at the Third Food Conference in Delhi on the 5 to 8 July, ... the suggestion that "the only reason why people are starving in Bengal is that there is hoarding" was greeted at the Conference by the other Provinces with applause.' Similarly, some officials in the Government of India refused to accept the evidence on the ground, preferring their own interpretations of the market: as late as November 1943, ‘The Government of India would admit no intrinsic shortage in Bengal in the Spring of 1943 and, even in November, at the height of the famine, the Director-General of Food in the Council of State said that "the major trouble in Bengal has been not so much an intrinsic shortage of essential food grains as a breakdown of public confidence.' On 19 October 1943, when the famine was at its peak, Wavell noted in his journal "On the food situation Linlithgow [The outgoing Viceroy] says chief factor morale.[i.e. panic hoarding]"

"... two alternative (though not necessarily mutually exclusive) sources of rich peasant power. One emanates from the possession of land, the other from the ability to manipulate higher level political and administrative structures."

Credit and land-grabbing
Insert here "convert overnight into private property instead of communal here Ambiguities in the Anglo-Indian legal framework arose, as colonial law was often at odds with Hindu traditions on the issue of property rights; the latter included "conventions [which] interfered with the rights of the individual to possess, acquire, use and accumulate property, especially land. These ambiguities and contradictions between "legal rights" and "customary rights" significantly included difficulties charging "competition rents" and re-possessing unproductive tenants' or defaulting debtors' lands. This created very strong disincentives against investing in the productivity of land.
 * see [CITATION] The cry of distress: a first-hand description and an objective study of the Indian famine of 1943, with illustrations and Shankar's cartoons; K Santhanam - 1943 - The Hindustan times

With the legal status and rights of land tenureship left ill-defined and unclear, the landlords had considerable leeway to make arrangements that worked to augment their incomes and mitigate strict British tax burdens. Rather than risk investing in such things as irrigation to improve the land's productivity, then, large landlords in Bengal typically chose the more reliable path of dispersing the right to own land and collect tax revenue through an extensive, complex network of land title relationships and transactions involving informal arrangements between various groups:

"What many... landlords... did was to sell off the right to collect rents in exchange for a fixed return. The sub-proprietors, or the buyers of such rights, in turn passed off the risk by selling the rights to another layer of intermediaries in lieu of a fixed return. Very soon layers and layers of intermediaries were spawned. A remarkably active market for rental rights had surfaced... The burden of the huge and intricate architecture of intermediaries of course rested on the actual cultivators placed at the bottom of the pyramid."

All_causes	100.00 "... in the strategic context of 1942, when the colonial authorities in the much-reduced British empire were forced to redefine their administrative priorities in order to be able to contribute materially to the flagging Allied military effort world-wide. In India, which became a major base for Allied military operations against Japanese forces after the fall of Malaya and Burma, the redefinition of official priorities consisted of giving absolute primacy to wartime mobilisation. This took many forms. The military command was given unprecedented powers to determine strategic policies in the provinces of Assam, Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and United Provinces, as well as all the princely states in this region, all of which were treated as a 'threatened area' and a unified administrative bloc for military purposes. Moreover, the civilian authorities in this region were ordered to devote their attention to the needs of the Eastern Army Command — and later the South East Asia Command — which involved concentrating the material and manpower resources available to them towards the creation of basic defensive preparations, like barracks, airfields, new railway lines and strategic roads, in an area completely unprepared for a major conflict. An immediate impact of these policies was the administrative tendency to prioritise Indian social groups in terms of their strategic 'worth', and their subsequent division into so-called 'priority' and 'non-priority' classes. While economic, print and oral propaganda were sought to be targeted at Indian society as a whole, the paucity of official resources caused by the strains resulting from the Pacific war meant that the various 'priority' classes became the primary targets of the various official wartime welfare initiatives and publicity advertising colonial 'development'."

denial
"The spotlight of war was nowhere in India as bright as it was in Calcutta. On the frontlines of the war, particularly after the fall of Burma, Calcutta, by 1943, was critical to the Allied fight against Japan — the primary staging ground for the push east against a formidable enemy. Governmental priorities in Bengal, from the beginning of the war, Mukherjee_hungry_2015"

"The confiscation or destruction of stocks of rice and other food items, cattle, boats, cycles and bullock carts compounded the food crisis in Bengal from 1 May 1942 to 30 March 1943.."

"In addition, embargoes were placed around purchasing areas, restricting export to all but government agents. Even in areas not covered under the scheme, embargoes were levied in order to prevent speculative purchasing by non-government agents in these markets. In "denial" areas special passes were given so that agents could bring boats into coastal areas to remove rice and paddy. A ceiling price was also fixed for the agents of the scheme, and purchases and sales above that ceiling were outlawed by threat of arrest and confiscation. This de facto price control measure was in contrast to earlier indications that the fixed price would not be enforced, which only added to confusion. Mukherjee_hungry_2015"

deep relationships 60–1 disrupt patron by force 61 not only growers but merchants seized 62 price == market + 10% but market soon met esp. with agents everywhere panic 62 transferred to govt warehouses was small p. 63 but most never made it; paddy left in fields, else left in hands of procurators went outside denial zones; all Bengal markets in disarray 62

"In the coastal districts the 'policy of denial' of food and transport to the Japanese in the event of a landing led to the removal of 'surplus stocks' of paddy as well as boats and bicycles to storage depots in the interior. The overall impact of the 'denial policy' was not as severe as the decision to feed industrial workers and government servants at the expense of the rural poor, but it did cause severe economic dislocation locally, including the loss of livelihood for fishermen and peasants cultivating alluvial lands. The 'denial policy', which was put in place in April 1942, coupled with the October cyclone, reduced the direct entitlement to food-grains of many peasant labourers."

BOATS about 1 year "all restrictions were removed in June 1943"

"the livelihoods of generations was lost in a matter of weeks, and for that loss, three months of wages were received – wages that even before they were dispersed had lost considerable value against a continually increasing cost of living – and many began to starve" p. 65 "Pinnell himself had argued staunchly for a further commitment to unrestricted 'free trade.' On April 23rd it was announced that all restrictions on river transport throughout the Bengal delta were to be removed in order to accelerate the movement of rice into Calcutta from the countryside. Though the number of boats actually plying had been sharply reduced a year earlier by 'denial,' the extraction of rice from the countryside remained dependent on river transport, and as such Government gave the 'all clear' - even while bombs were actually now falling across the province. A week later another order was issued which removed all restrictions on the movement of rice between districts except existing restrictions on exports from the industrial area of Calcutta to rural districts."
 * Direct impact on livelihoods
 * "According to the Famine Commission, a total of 66,563 boats came under different forms of restriction. This figure is accepted by Sen, Greenough and Alamgir. However, Kali Charan Ghose notes that within a "few days. since the introduction of the policy, no less than 25,000 boats were confiscated. On the basis of five persons depending on the earning derived from a boat, Ghose calculated that the policy immediately threw out 125,000 persons into a state of panic and penury. The number might have been even greater if the entire period of denial, of more than a year, were taken into consideration. Even if we take the minimum range of confiscation as suggested by Famine Commission, that is about 65,000, then the number of affected people would be [325,000], taking five persons per family."

"In 1942, before the Quit India movement was started, Satish moved to the eastern district of Bengal and tried to organize popular resistance against the forced evacuation policy enacted by the British on account of the Japanese advance on the Indo-Burmese frontier, which resulted in economic distress and dire health conditions for thousands of Bengali villagers. He took up relief work in various ways, including the setting up of a Parisr??m??lay, a sort of open workshop where everybody could earn his daily pay by plying the charkha, weaving or doing other jobs. At the same time he sought the Indian ministers' help at Calcutta to stop the evacuation, but to no avail. At Feni (Noakhali district) he opened an office for the rescue of evacuees: here, on one occasion he was visited by representatives of six villages in the surrounding area, whose inhabitants had been ordered to move. The Khadi Pratisthan report for 1942-43 reads, in part: 41913060"

etc
"leading a quasi-famine existence.However, on an another level, the events immediately preceding the famine also played an important role. The Bengal famine occurred during World War II. The war caused a cessation of normal imports of rice from Burma which was captured by Japan in early 1942; consequently a deficiency in food supply resulting from the poor harvest of 1941 was largely un-met. Government controls brought dislocation of trade. Increased demand for food was created by both the army and the inflow of refugees from Burma.  In 1942 there was "a heavy drain on [food] stocks, with increased exports and decreased imports".* Moreover, a cyclone accompanied by torrential rains and tidal waves in October 1942 caused major crop losses — especially in Midnapore district. All these factors pushed up the price of rice and other essentials, starting from  1941.  In turn, rising prices fuelled "speculation, hoarding and profiteering" and helped create to artificial shortages. Because of this process food prices reached "astronomical heights" in 1943, which ironically was neither a year of drought nor, probably, of significant food-shortage. In August of 1943, the quoted price of rice (Bengal's most important food) in the Calcutta market was more than eight times its corresponding monthly average for 1937-40. However, according to calculations made by the Famine Inquiry Commission, the shortage of rice in"

- Maharatna_1992

"In the former years rice could be imported from Burma into Calcutta, as historically it had been in the 1936 famine (GB 1941: 28) and intervening years to keep the price of grain low (Chakravarti 1939: 36). In 1940-41, there were 293,686 metric tons of rice imported through Calcutta (Chattopadhyay 1981: 137) and there would have been further imports into Chittagong and other East Bengal ports. But it was less the amount of grain imported than the ease of importation of Burma rice into the markets of Calcutta that kept the Bengal rice price down. In 1942-3 on the other hand Burma was under the control of the Japanese."

- Brennan

"The Japanese conquest of Burma created an immediate and serious crisis for several parts of India. On the west coast, Bombay was faced with living on less than three-quarters of its usual grain supplies. Cochin, with a population of 1.5 million, normally imported 60 percent of the rice it required, mainly from Burma. Travancore imported a smaller but still substantial share for a population of six million.82 Bothtauger09"

"Most studies of the Bengal famine refer to Bengal's loss of rice from Burma after the Japanese conquest of that country in spring 1942 and minimize its significance, but the loss of Burma's rice was more significant for Bombay, Travancore, and Cochin than it was for Bengal. Deficit provinces were also often called upon to export grain to regions with even greater deficits that were under British control, like Ceylon, and to British allies, like Persia.tauger09"

"The Battle of the Atlantic was at its peak from mid- 1942 to mid-1943, with submarine wolf packs sinking so many ships that the Allies were on the verge of defeat, so shipping could not be spared for India. Also, the Japanese were covering the Bay of Bengal, railways were overstretched sending men and equipment to war zones (Burma) and not set up for sending stocks of food anyway.churchill_and_india"

"Notwithstanding the primary importance of provincial and national level factors, the famine occurred in the districts and some of these were affected more than others. There; appears to have been two sets of districts in which the famine was more severe (FIC 1945: 112-15). First, those where a deficit in the production of rice was normally met by sales of jute. But in 1943 the wholesale price of jute was low at an average (on index terms) of 130 on a base of 100 -1914, against cereals, 397 (Chattopadhyay 1981:141), and the boat 'denial' policies of the government in 1942 had destroyed the usual transport facilities of these districts. The second set of districts to be affected was that which had suffered a natural calamity. One of these was Rangpur....In Bengal in 1943, the regions which were worst hit were those which had experienced climatic difficulties or which were normally deficit in food grain production."

Ali, Tariq Omar. The Envelope of Global Trade: The Political Economy and Intellectual History of Jute in the Bengal Delta, 1850s to 1950s. Diss. 2013. Peasant landholdings fragmented, as Muslim inheritance laws stipulated the division of property amongst children. In 1929-30, the average landholding of “occupancy ryots” paying cash rents varied from just over 1 acre in Pabna to about 2.8 acres in Mymensingh. Sharecroppers paying produce rents had much smaller lands – estimated at less than an acre in Mymensingh and Tippera (see Table 3.1).

Table 1.1: Acreage of jute in major jute-districts of northern and eastern Bengal, 1872 to 19107 District 1872 1880 1890 1900 1910

Jalpaiguri 50,000 15,400 20,500 63,000 94,800

Rangpur 100,000 131,200 600,000 277,000 237,600

Dinajpur 117,600 14,600 96,000 80,000 92,000

Pabna 122,900 102,300 150,000 136,500 180,100

Bogra 46,600 36,600 35,000 88,000 120,000

Mymensingh 48,000 160,900 301,000 519,000 717,500

Dacca 40,000 115,000 180,000 161,000 184,600

Faridpur 16,600 79,600 80,000 100,000 120,200

Tippera 78,400 0 190,800 219,000 236,900

Rest of Bengal 139,205 140,200 272,800 321,100 447,900

Total 759,305 795,800 1,926,100 1,964,600 2,431,600

Proportion of Bengal's jute cultivated in above districts 81.7 82.4 85.8 83.7 81.6 "On May 18th the Government of India announced its own "free trade" policy. Heeding the demands made by the Government of Bengal, they abrogated the "Basic Plan," which had established Government of India control over inter-provincial trade in food grains. All trade [barrier]s between Bengal and its neighboring provinces of Bihar, Orissa, and Assam were abolished overnight, and as such the order effectively relinquished the last vestige of central authority (or accountability) over the food supply of India. The results of the order were predictable. "The introduction of free trade," as Famine Enquiry Commission found, "led immediately to the invasion of the provinces of Bihar, Orissa and Assam by a large army of purchasers from Bengal ."203 Conditions in Bengal were replicated in microcosm, as the mania to feed Calcutta destabilized large regions of the peripheral countryside. Prices in Bihar and Orissa shot up immediately, while in Calcutta only a transitory dip in prices was registered. The Government of Bihar lodged an angry protest. "Bengal merchants or their agents," they charged, "went into the interior villages and offered fantastic prices, as a result of which the arrivals of supplies in local markets were extremely poor [and] prices fluctuated almost from hour to hour due to wild speculation."204 In Orissa the consequences were similar. According to the provincial Government: "it was undoubtedly the greatest factor in causing high prices, hoarding and the un-availability of foodgrains to consumers in the later part of 1943."205 In short, the Government of India's experiment had confirmed that the policies adopted in Bengal some months earlier, were just as "effective" everywhere. Meanwhile, growing provincial distrust only isolated Bengal further in its plight."
 * mansergh

"Faridpur, like Dacca, was a center of jute cultivation, with a population of 2,888,803 in 1941 (Census 1941:68) and an estimated rice production deficit of about 70,000 tons in 1939 (Chakravarty 1939:35; Mukerji 1965:170). The physical structure of the district rendered the internal movement of grain difficult, and the district imported rice from three different sources with imports from [Burm]a acting as a moderating influence on grain prices (Jack 119161 1975:15-16, 42; DCS 1944b:38-39, 44). According to B. R. Sen, beginning in 1940 a series of bad years in Faridpur had necessitated assistance from the Revenue Department (Nanavati 1944:446). In 1942 the Japanese occupation of [Burm]a, the boat denial policy, and grain embargoes restricted the amount of grain coming from the south. The situation eased in late 1942 with the gradual sale of the denial stocks stored in the district (DCS 1944b:44)."

"A government-appointed committee enquiring into the malaise in rice prices in Bengal during the depression came out with a report in 1940 recommending measures to stimulate the rice market which, ironically enough, included remission of the export duty on Bengal rice and imposition of an import duty on [Burm]ese rice in excess of a certain quota. These proved unnecessary after all. The price of rice was up 33% in September 1940 and 69% in September 1941 on its August 1939 level and in early March 1942 the index stood at 59.50 The fall of [Burm]a did cut off [Burm]ese supplies and diverted the demand from its rice markets in southern India and Ceylon on to Bengal, but the scale of these shifts was puny by comparison to the price-hike set off by speculative tendencies in the rice market after March 1942. An attempt by the government to put a ceiling on the maximum price of rice in June 1942 proved abortive since it had no control over supplies: a ban on rice exports from the province in July 1942 was rather more effective.51 The cyclone of October 1942 caused crop damage in coastal areas but, more importantly, aggravated the tendency to speculative buying and panic hoarding. The wholesale price of rice jumped from between Rs 9 and 10 per maund in mid-November 1942 to between Rs 13 and 14 in mid- December, and then rocketed to Rs. 21 by mid-March 1943 and to over Rs 30 by mid-May. Rice sold for more than Rs 100 per maund in some districts later in the year.52 Some rather curious notions of the effects of the rise in agricultural prices in the Bengal countryside prevailed in certain government circles, which seemed quite insensitive to the inequalities in the agrarian social structure. As late as 14 January 1943 the revenue secretary to the provincial government asserted in a circular to district officers that the rise in prices had 'placed greatly increased purchasing in the hands of the agriculturalists ...[and] that this year should afford a marvellous opportunity to enforce collection of as near as 0oo p.c. of the outstanding demands of agricultural loans as possible ...53 The horrified responses from the men on the spot told a very different tale. It was the grain-dealers and not the working peasantry who had benefited from the high prices. Smallholding peasants had generally sold early after the harvest, being unable to hold out for long."

"By the turn of the year particularly grave material distress and social disruption became evident in two districts and these were to be the sites of long-lasting and intense famine suffering. In coastal Midnapur the cyclone, following on the savage repression of a Congress-led rebellion in one sub-division (the Tamluk Jatiya Sarkar or 'National Government'), led directly to starvation conditions. Across the province to the east in Chittagong district, famine appeared in early 1943 as the accompaniment to an Allied troop build-up, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees from [Burm]a, a sudden scarcity of all daily consumer needs, and the virtual collapse of British credibility. In Midnapur environmental damage was paramount, while in Chittagong it was preparation for military struggle, but in both cases there was a concatenation of disorder, market distress and shifting political legitimacy.Greenough_1980"

"The origin of the famine turns only in part upon the food supply position. Despite centuries of abundance and a tradition of making exports of rice to other provinces, sometime in the I93os Bengal had become a food deficit province. Rising population and declining production had tipped the balance, so that a small but critical depend- ence (no more than 4 percent of annual consumption in the pre-famine years) upon imported rice from [Burm]a was a regular feature of the economy.7 There was no general perception by politicians or the bureaucracy, however, that Bengal was no longer self-sufficient in rice, and exports of fine Bengali grades continued to be made. With the fall of [Burm]a in March I942, all imports from that quarter stopped abruptly. Fortunately, the winter (aman) paddy crop of the preceding year had been abundant. Then in mid-October I942 a devastating cyclone ripped through the coastal districts of Midnapur and 24- Parganas, which were among the most fertile producers of surplus paddy. In Midnapur approximately 7,400 villages in an area of 3,300 square miles were partly or wholly destroyed, and another I,6oo villages in 900 square miles were badly flooded. More than I4,400 7 The extent of the Bengalis' dependence upon [Burm]a rice, or the date from which dependence became a fact, cannot be precisely stated. The famine commissioners thought that Bengal became a net importer of rice in the I93os. The net quantity being imported between I934 and 1942 was, on the average, less than 300,000 tons annually, which was less than 4 per cent of the average annual consumption of rice in Bengal of about 8.5 million tons. Famine Inquiry Commission, Report on Bengal (New Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1945), Appendix 2, Statement i, p. 2I3. See, for slightly different estimates, Sir Henry Knight, Food Administration in India, 1939-47 (Stanford: Stanford University, 1954), p. 26, and India, Office of the Agricultural Marketing Adviser, Report No. 27, Report on the Marketing of Rice in India and [Burm]a (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1941), Appendix 36.Greenough_1980"

"On 26 January the Viceroy wrote to the Secretary of State for India: 'Mindful of our difficulties about food I told him [the Premier of Bengal] that he simply must produce some more rice out of Bengal for Ceylon even if Bengal itself went short! He was by no means unsympathetic, and it is possible that I may in the result screw a little out of them.'! The estimates of'shortage' based on production figures (including that of the 'indifferent' winter crop) did not make such a suggestion look preposterous, even though--as we have seen--the forces leading to the famine were already in full swing."

"The rules were a modification by 0. M. Martin of the Famine Code devised in the nineteenth century. Martin had been responsible for famine relief in 1936 when West Bengal had suffered a severe drought. In the context of low grain prices, easily accessible supplies from [Burm]a, and good rail communications, the energy of Martin and the volunteers who ran the gratuitous relief system had been sufficient to prevent any great loss of life (GBR 1941:28; GBRM 1937: Mar. 1-3, Oct. 2, Nov. 1-6, Dec. 1-30). The government was so confident of its ability to cope with famine that the Famine Manual advised that if the traditional warning signs of feverish activity in the grain trade, increased crime, and wandering of people were observed, it indicated "that relief measures have been unduly delayed" (GBR 1941:29).Brennan_govrelief_88"

"the [Burm]ese capital, had fallen to Japanese forces in March 1942, and in the following months fears grew that the Japanese, even though already militarily overstretched, would soon invade Bengal. In April 1942 the Japanese sank a destroyer and several merchantmen in the Bay of Bengal, and they bombed Calcutta in December 1942. Other sporadic air-raids followed. As a result, the usual supplies of rice from [Burm]a, albeit a small proportion of aggregate consumption, were cut off. In addition, on military advice officials removed rice and paddy deemed surplus to local requirements from coastal districts such as Midnapur, Bakerganj, and Khulna. They also requisitioned and sank boats capable of carrying ten passengers or more in order to prevent their use by any invading Japanese soldiers. This 'boat denial policy' compromised the livelihoods of two of Bengal's most vulnerable groups—fishermen and boatmen—and increased transport costs. Military considerations also meant giving urban workers, particularly those in war-related industries, priority over others, so that public agencies and Calcutta factory owners competed with other consumers."

"The conventional view of the Bengal famine as a "man-made famine" that had no origins in shortage is not only inaccurate but also unjustly narrow and oversimplified. The real crisis was much broader and more . Government officials at all levels faced a with inadequate resources. Traders increased prices simultaneously with monsoon failures, cyclones, and crop failures, and all of these events were more than the conventional interpretation envisages. The Bengal crisis did not at first appear as serious as it became later. The subsistence crises also occurred simultaneously with internal crises." "the Railways and Port Trust, it was later revealed, also made arrangements to purchase and move large quantities of rice on the behalf of third parties.197	Mukherjee_hungry_2015.txt"

This combination of supply shocks was followed by a final price shock when a series of price controls, ineffective at best because they had not been accompanied by government control over supply, were temporarily removed. This created an opening for prices to jolt far higher. "Wars, blockades, poor governance, and civil [unrest] can also lead to famines; panics about the food supply and poorly performing markets can exacerbate them. In such cases, as Sen (1981) has argued, factors other than crop shortfalls reduce the purchasing power or "entitlements" of vulnerable sections of the population: the size of the loaf matters less than its distribution.ogradac_article_pub_063"

"across regions and countries and, as noted above, major back-to-back failures are few, spatial and intertemporal arbitrage should help mitigate or reduce the cost of famines (Karl Gunnar Persson 1999; Smith 1976). However, natural (poor communications) and artificial obstacles (war, trade restrictions and price controls, civil [unrest]) have often impeded the scope for arbitrage. Collective resistance (as in Ireland in 1846–47 and in France in 1709) and local administrators (as in different Indian provinces in 1943) may seek to protect consumers in would-be exporting regions.ogradac_article_pub_063"


 * 1) Darjeeling
 * 2) Kalimpong
 * 3) Kurseong
 * 4) Siliguri
 * 5) Alipur Duars
 * 6) Jalpaiguri
 * 7) Nilphamari
 * 8) Kurigram
 * 9) Gaibandha
 * 10) Rangpur
 * 11) Thakurgaon
 * 12) Dinajpur
 * 13) Balurghat
 * 14) Bogra
 * 15) Sirajganj
 * 16) Pabna
 * 17) Natore
 * 18) Rajshahi
 * 19) Naogaon
 * 20) Maldah
 * 21) Rampurhat
 * 22) Birbhum
 * 23) Katwa
 * 24) Kalna
 * 25) Burdwan
 * 26) Asansol
 * 27) Bishnupur
 * 28) Bankura
 * 29) Jhargram
 * 30) Midnapur
 * 31) Contai
 * 32) Tamluk
 * 33) Ghatal
 * 34) Ulubaria
 * 35) Howrah
 * 36) Arambagh
 * 37) Serampore
 * 38) Hooghly
 * 39) Jhangipur
 * 40) Lalbagh
 * 41) Kandi
 * 42) Murshidabad
 * 43) Kustia
 * 44) Meherpur
 * 45) Chuadanga
 * 46) Nadia
 * 47) Ranaghat
 * 48) Barrackpore
 * 49) Barasat
 * 50) Diamond-Harbour
 * 51) 24-Parganas
 * 52) Basirhat
 * 53) Bangram
 * 54) Jhinaidah
 * 55) Magura
 * 56) Narail
 * 57) Jessore
 * 58) Satkhira
 * 59) Khulna
 * 60) Bagherhat
 * 61) Perojpur
 * 62) Patuakhali
 * 63) Bhola
 * 64) Barisal
 * 65) Madaripur
 * 66) Gopalganj
 * 67) Faridpur
 * 68) Goalundo
 * 69) Manikaganj
 * 70) Munshiganj
 * 71) Narayanganj
 * 72) Dacca
 * 73) Tangail
 * 74) Jamalpur
 * 75) Mymensingh
 * 76) Netrokona
 * 77) Kishorgunj
 * 78) Brahmanbaria
 * 79) Tippera
 * 80) Chandpur
 * 81) Noakhali
 * 82) Fen i
 * 83) Chittagong
 * 84) Cox's Bazar
 * 85) Ramgarh
 * 86) Rangamati

"The small scale of Indian farming, its distance from the market and need for [short]-term credit to pay revenue and finance seasonal operations, put creditors and men with power in the market in a very strong position and enabled them to manipulate the mechanisms of exchange to their own advantage. In effect, on this reading of the evidence, the colonial class structure appears perfectly functional to, and the paradigm creation of, both metropolitan and Indian capital. At costs kept low by lack of need to invest in the means of production and at risks kept low by their transference to the peasant producer, capital could enjoy an unproblematic profitability."

The Government of India realized its mistake and demanded a return to free trade. However, the Government of India Act 1935 had removed most of the central government's authority over the Provinces, and the Provinces refused. Thus, even when the Government of India decreed that there should be free trade in grain, politicians, civil servants, local government officers and police obstructed the movement of grain to famine areas. For example, "though many traders want to export food [to Bengal] the Punjab Government would not give them permits. [There were] large quantities of undisposed-of rice... in the Punjab." In some cases provincial authorities seized grain in transit from other Provinces to Bengal. It was even claimed by a leading politician that "Bengal had been deliberately starved out by other provinces" which refused to permit the export of grain. "[Bengal's] position was aggravated by acute psychological factors which were the results of the war, and of the military situation at the time. Burma had fallen, refugees were pouring in, retreating troops were coming into Bengal, the danger of invasion was imminent, Calcutta had been bombed, there was danger of further air raids, serious doubts existed as to the capacity of British troops to stem the Japanese [advances], the 'denial' policy had been put into action, political unrest of serious magnitude had manifested itself within the province and in the neighbouring areas, the 'Quit India' demand been made, political dissensions in Bengal were serious, cyclone and floods had destroyed human life, cattle, and crops and stores of foodgrains, and there was an atmosphere of tension. No one knew what was coming. Everyone played for safety; food, the most urgent requirement of [mankind], was to be conserved. The producer wished to lay by stocks for his own consumption; consumers were anxious to secure supplies. Employees of big industries wished to feed their employees. Essential services had to be maintained. Traders knew that money could be made. The marketable quantity had diminished. The combination of these formidable factors created unprecedented conditions...hunger marches had started. The price of rice had risen enormously... A series of calamities, each one of unprecedented magnitude, followed in such quick succession that the administration was overwhelmed."

"Faridpur, like Dacca, was a center of jute cultivation,"
 * JUTE
 * Government disarray (BRENNAN)

"The "autumn disorders" were protests in Midnapur district in Bengal that began as part of the "Quit India" movement. It should be noted that shortly before he died, Governor Herbert concluded on the basis of more information that he had received during 1943 that Bengal had a much more serious rice shortage than he had thought and that this shortage was a cause of the famine; see O' Grada, Tawney lecture, part 3, http://www.ehs.org.uk/downloads.asp, accessed 4 March 2009."

"The extent and the nature of relief assistance were determined by the balance of food and cash sent into the districts and mediated by the energy and the efficiency of local officials. The first two of these variables is shown for the province in figure 5, which also indicates the total gratuitous funding and the amounts of rice sent to Midnapore for cyclone relief. Although the figure does not include food requisitioned or purchased by officers within their districts, it reflects the provincial effort, which can be divided into three periods: from October 1942 to March 1943 when little grain was sent to the districts; from April to August 1943 when the DCS sent grain purchased outside the province to the districts; and from September to December 1943 when grain, especially from the Punjab, began to flow in response to pressure from the Government of India."

"In January 1943 a committee appointed by Calcutta's municipal council suggested the need for food rationing.20 By March–April the situation was already critical both in coastal sections of Midnapur in western Bengal, where the cyclone had struck, and in eastern Bengal. Relief works began, albeit on a small scale, in villages near Dacca in March, and food rations were supplied to government employees at controlled prices. In early April a deputation from Chittagong, next to Japanese-occupied Burma, prompted an assurance from a senior official that rice and paddy supplies would be provided "immediately" and food rationing introduced there shortly. In Patgram in the extreme north, in "very many cases" barley chaff was being substituted for rice. There was severe hardship too in the area hit by the [cycl]one in mid-October and in the east of Bengal.21"

"116 Sumit Sarkar, p. 391 For a more complete treatment of the extent, spread, and nature of the [Quit] India movement, see the same, pp. 388-404"

"The war also placed new pressures on the administrative machinery, which had been established for the purpose of the management of civic amenities. Large contingents of troops arrived in Bengal from 1942 onwards, mostly consisting of British and Americans recruits to the Bengal–Burma border. The immediate and excessive pressure placed on health, civil supplies and other departments increased the government's necessity to provide additional stocks of medicines and food grains, especially rice, to the army. The government also had to requisition houses and land for the army for the construction of new airports and barracks (Bhattacharya 2001). In addition, the necessity to deploy additional troops to curb civil disobedience movements, such as the [Quit] India Movement (1942), resulted in the administration finding itself in a position of being stranded without possessing either the manpower or adequate infrastructural facilities to effectively cope with shortage in food grains. What followed was a horrifying tale of disease, starvation and unprecedented rates of mortality in the history of India. The Great Bengal Famine of 1943–44 was the worst possible human calamity in the history of twentieth-century India."

"In the official reckoning of the time, the effort to de-limit famine to the year of 1943 is most pronounced. Denials, indifference, and administrative incompetence led to the highly consequential failure — by default or design — to recognize famine until as late as September of 1943 - once its eruption on the streets of Calcutta could no longer be ignored. In its Report on Bengal, the imperially sanctioned Famine Enquiry Commission found, a bit less conservatively, that the Bengal Famine had, in fact, begun "in the early months" of the same year.7 This contention was later complicated by historian Paul Greenough, in his work Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal, which represents the only existent full-length study of the Bengal Famine until now. Writing in 1982, Greenough argues that the Bengal Famine could said to have begun in October of 1942, in the wake of a devastating cyclone which decimated the district of Midnapur, south- west of Calcutta.8 However, as early as August 2nd of 1942, the Chief Minister of Bengal, Fazlul Huq, had informed the colonial administration, that "at the present moment we are faced with a rice famine in Bengal."9 As I will demonstrate in Chapters One and Two of the work to follow, even this early recognition by the Chief Minister was extremely tardy. Reports of famine from the districts of Bengal had been wide-spread since at least two years earlier. Moreover, the abject impoverishment of the Bengal country-side and "the silent violence of malnutrition," that define the long trajectory of famine, had been at least a decade in the making. As early as 1934, Bengali social scientist Satish Chandra Mitter noted in his Recovery Plan for Bengal that the rural poor, even at that time, "[could not] but be hunger-stricken and starving."10"

"One explanation is that the food crises of 1936 and 1943 were brought about by different sets of factors. The underlying macroeconomic situation in 1936 assisted a relief system based on increasing the money supply in areas impoverished by the depression and affected by drought, thereby providing a market for cheap grain from other areas of India and from Burma. Although there is dispute about the causes of the 1943 famine (Brennan, Heathcote, and Lucas, 1984a: 11-13), it is clear that economic circumstances in 1943 differed significantly from those in 1936. Amartya Sen (1982) argues that the famine was not caused primarily by a decline in the availability of food but by an economic crisis brought about by the inflationary funding of the war effort. This reduced the real wages of occupational groups such as fishermen, agricultural laborers, and transport workers to such an extent that they were unable to buy food.2 Another aspect of the answer is that the state did not provide the destitute with their "entitlement" to relief as effectively as it had done in 1936 (A. Sen 1982:45- 46). Paul Greenough (1982:127-38) comes to the same conclusion as the Famine Inquiry Commission (FIC 1945:69-75), that the operation failed to cope with the enormity of the dislocation of society caused by the famine. To some extent it failed because three of the conditions on which the 1936 response had been based no longer held: the Japanese controlled Burma, and other provinces were reluctant to export grain to Bengal; the "[denial]" policy had crippled boat traffic near the coast while the roads and railways were clogged with military traffic;3 and the traders were either 2 Greenough (1982:102-16) demonstrates how inflationary war funding interacted with the pressure to feed the industrial base of the war effort in Calcutta, and with the early attempts to control rice prices in Bengal, to destroy the grain trade. This was exacerbated by speculation and the slow release of rice by producers. Unable to draw grain from Burma and with little shipping available to bring wheat from Australia (Mansergh and Lumbey 1973:133-41, 155-58), the provincial government had to rely on the importation of wheat from Punjab and rice from its neighboring provinces. Until September this strategy failed because of its inability to impress on the central government the extent of Bengal's needs, and the Government of Punjab's reluctance to bring pressure on farmers to sell wheat at prices much lower than those prevailing in Bengal (Mansergh and Lumbey 1973:178-80). The governments of the neighboring provinces successfully resisted the penetration into their rice markets of the greater purchasing power of Bengal."

Agrarian Class Formation in Modern Bengal, 1931-51 Author(s): Saugata Mukherji Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Jan. 25, 1986), pp. PE11-PE21+PE24- PE27 Published by: Economic and Political Weekly Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4375249 "...total money supply rose from [3.17 billion Rupees] in 1939 to [21.9 billion Rupees] in 1945 ... This expansion in monetary circulation accompanied by scarcity of civilian goods as a result of diversion to war effort and speculative hoarding of essential goods naturally resulted in enormous increases in the price level. The general price index rose to Rs 236.5 in 1943/44 with August 1939 as 100,88 the rise in the price index of rice alone rising to 951 in December 1943, for obvious reasons. Apart from starvation and death in Bengal, there was a marked fall in the consumption of essential goods all over the country; civilian consumption of cotton goods fell by more than 23 per cent from the peace time level by 1943/44 and home production of kerosene had halved during the same time. There was no breakthrough in industrial production either, and indeed industry was to fall into a deep recession once the war was over"

code

 * "Concerns about war morale also explain why the Bengali authorities were so reluctant to operate the Famine Codes, even though classic famine symptoms were present, and why the full extent of the crisis remained largely hidden from the outside world for so long.
 * Famine was not declared, according to the Revenue Department, because until June its strategy was based on the belief that grain would become available through the central government and this dictated a policy of "creating confidence." After June it was not confident that the central government would supply either the grain or the funds to meet the "extraordinary obligations for relief." In these circumstances it claimed it would have been useless to declare a famine. The underlying reality was that it believed that more available money would aggravate the supply situation (GBR 1944:1-2).

misc

 * "One explanation is that the food crises of 1936 and 1943 were brought about by different sets of factors. The underlying macroeconomic situation in 1936 assisted a relief system based on increasing the money supply in areas impoverished by the depression and affected by drought, thereby providing a market for cheap grain from other areas of India and from Burma. Although there is dispute about the causes of the 1943 famine (Brennan, Heathcote, and Lucas, 1984a: 11-13), it is clear that economic circumstances in 1943 differed significantly from those in 1936. Amartya Sen (1982) argues that the famine was not caused primarily by a decline in the availability of food but by an economic crisis brought about by the inflationary funding of the war effort. This reduced the real wages of occupational groups such as fishermen, agricultural laborers, and transport workers to such an extent that they were unable to buy food.2 Another aspect of the answer is that the state did not provide the destitute with their "entitlement" to relief as effectively as it had done in 1936 (A. Sen 1982:45- 46). Paul Greenough (1982:127-38) comes to the same conclusion as the Famine Inquiry Commission (FIC 1945:69-75), that the operation failed to cope with the enormity of the dislocation of society caused by the famine. To some extent it failed because three of the conditions on which the 1936 response had been based no longer held: the Japanese controlled Burma, and other provinces were reluctant to export grain to Bengal; the "[denial]" policy had crippled boat traffic near the coast while the roads and railways were clogged with military traffic;3 and the traders were either 2 Greenough (1982:102-16) demonstrates how inflationary war funding interacted with the pressure to feed the industrial base of the war effort in Calcutta, and with the early attempts to control rice prices in Bengal, to destroy the grain trade. This was exacerbated by speculation and the slow release of rice by producers. Unable to draw grain from Burma and with little shipping available to bring wheat from Australia (Mansergh and Lumbey 1973:133-41, 155-58), the provincial government had to rely on the importation of wheat from Punjab and rice from its neighboring provinces. Until September this strategy failed because of its inability to impress on the central government the extent of Bengal's needs, and the Government of Punjab's reluctance to bring pressure on farmers to sell wheat at prices much lower than those prevailing in Bengal (Mansergh and Lumbey 1973:178-80). The governments of the neighboring provinces successfully resisted the penetration into their rice markets of the greater purchasing power of Bengal."
 * "'While British defeats at Rangoon and Singapore had been a shocking blow, Calcutta was an immensely more important city; psychologically, strategically, and  economically. It had been the foundation of British imperialism in Asia, the "second  city" of Empire, the "London of the East," and the first capital of colonial rule in India. It  was now the central collection point of personnel and resources for the Allied military  mobilization against Japan. Hundreds of thousands of British, American, African and  Indian troops passed through the city on their way to the front, and returned there for  "rest and recreation." It also served as the gateway to vital coal and iron ore fields to the  west, which fed industrial production essential to the war effort. Its factories were  running at full tilt to supply armaments and other supplies to the military. Huge profits  were being made in the textile, engineering, food services and entertainment industries.  The city was, in many ways, awash in cash.. The loss of Calcutta under these  circumstances, as the Viceroy himself confessed, would be "tantamount to the loss of  India." As such, the pressure on governmental officials in Bengal, and particularly on  I.C.S. officers like L. G. Pinnell, to supply Calcutta and keep its industries functioning  was tremendous. Moreover, it came from all quarters; the military, big business, the  Secretary of State\'s office in London, the Government of India in Delhi, and also from  foreign governments, particularly the Americans, who were investing more and more of  their own resources in the war in the Pacific. \n', '.txt\n', 'While British defeats at Rangoon and Singapore had been a shocking blow, Calcutta was an immensely more important city; psychologically, strategically, and economically. It had been the foundation of British imperialism in Asia, the "second city" of Empire, the "London of the East," and the first capital of colonial rule in India. It was now the central collection point of personnel and resources for the Allied military mobilization against Japan. Hundreds of thousands of British, American, African and Indian troops passed through the city on their way to the front, and returned there for "rest and recreation." It also served as the gateway to vital coal and iron ore fields to the west, which fed industrial production essential to the war effort. Its factories were running at full tilt to supply armaments and other supplies to the military. Huge profits were being made in the textile, engineering, food services and entertainment industries. The city was, in many ways, awash in cash.. The loss of Calcutta under these circumstances, as the Viceroy himself confessed, would be "tantamount to the loss of India." As such, the pressure on governmental officials in Bengal, and particularly on I.C.S. officers like L. G. Pinnell, to supply Calcutta and keep its industries functioning was tremendous. Moreover, it came from all quarters; the military, big business, the Secretary of State\'s office in London, the Government of India in Delhi, and also from foreign governments, particularly the Americans, who were investing more and more of their own resources in the war in the Pacific.\n', '.txt\n']
 * Writing many years later, historian Sugata Bose touches upon many of the same themes as S.C. Mitter had, extending his argument into the 1940s. Restrictions on rent increases, mandated by the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, compounded by increasing pressures of population and diminishing sizes of land holdings among the gentry, made it increasingly difficult for landlords to profit from rent extraction. Rural capitalist turned to [usur]ious credit schemes to augment their diminishing rent returns, which further straitened the already impoverished peasantry.95 With increasing commercialization of grain markets and the vicissitudes of a volatile jute trade, "many peasants fell into debt and could only carry on by borrowing seed and grain from year to year; and in course of time, some were reduced to a position close to that of landless laborers."96 As such cultivators were trapped in a cycle of debt and repayment that left them on the verge of starvation between crops. Small scale producers (which comprised the majority of agriculturalists in Bengal97) were forced to sell their products at deflated prices during the post-harvest glut in order to pay loans taken during the pre-harvest "starvation" season. Interest rates on loans ranged as high as 75%, and so needed to be repaid as soon as repayment was possible. Lack of local storage facilities also meant that peasants lacked the resources to stockpile against annual shortage. By mid-August, yearly, many were, again, borrowing against imminent starvation. This cycle led to the increasing impoverishment of the countryside during the first three decades of the twentieth century.
 * Whatever the arrangements, delays in the disposal of corpses continued with unsightly and unsanitary consequences: rotting corpses on the streets of Calcutta continued to undermine "morale." Moreover, the official publication of the numbers of famine victims dying on the streets of Calcutta (however inaccurate147) was extremely bad PR for the colonial government, particularly during wartime. Since The Statesman had published its pictures, "The Bengal Famine" had become an international [news] story. Corpses in Calcutta were easy fodder for the media frenzy. On the 9th of September, therefore, the government decided to withhold official death statistics from the press. Such statistics, the central government argued, could serve no particular purpose, and furthermore, in the midst of an acute paper shortage, [news]papers might, indeed, "welcome" the suppression of statistics as an opportunity to save space on their front pages for more important stories.148 Due to quick protest from the press, however, the order to withhold famine statistics was repealed after only two days. The statistics reported after the stop-order, however, were of a different kind. The word "starvation" had been removed, and the term "sick destitutes" was substituted. The number of "sick destitutes" who had died on the streets of Calcutta was accompanied by an appendix that assigned various causes of death to the corpses collected. Most of the deaths, in these


 * In other places, however, famine deaths were becoming too numerous to properly count. [News]papers reported deaths from starvation in 25 of the 27 districts in Bengal through October 11th.153 Rice had all but vanished from local markets, and villages in

"However, despite dissent, government, backed by military authority, left a deep footprint. With the removal of more that 46,000 country boats from coastal districts, the economic infrastructure of rural Bengal collapsed. If the initial objective of denial, as was officially stated, was the "complete destruction of internal economy, trade and administration,"66 nothing could have furthered that goal more swiftly than the removal and destruction of the majority of Bengal's country boats. From the beginning, the Famine Enquiry Commission reported, "it was always recognized that the removal of a large number of boats from the delta, in which communications [means of transport] are almost entirely by [river] and not by rail or road, would cause considerable hardship and difficulties."67 And that it did. "In the districts of Khulna, 24 Parganas, Bakargunj and Tippera, it completely broke the economy of the fishing class."68 In districts where people were involved in pottery making, an important and substantial industry that required large inland shipments of clay, many people "were put out of trade and...their families became destitute."69 The productive and important paddy fields at the mouth of the delta in several districts could not be cultivated, and, moreover, the primary means of transportation of people, as well as goods and services, was almost entirely crippled. Pinnell admitted that boat denial had "throttled down" the rice trade, but the true impact of this massive dislocation of conveyance on the food supply in Bengal is impossible to

"[Bengal's] position was aggravated by acute psychological factors which were the results of the war, and of the military situation at the time. Burma had fallen, refugees were pouring in, retreating troops were coming into Bengal, the danger of invasion was imminent, Calcutta had been bombed, there was danger of further air raids, serious doubts existed as to the capacity of British troops to stem the Japanese [advances], the 'denial' policy had been put into action, political unrest of serious magnitude had manifested itself within the province and in the neighbouring areas, the 'Quit India' demand been made, political dissensions in Bengal were serious, cyclone and floods had destroyed human life, cattle, and crops and stores of foodgrains, and there was an atmosphere of tension. No one knew what was coming. Everyone played for safety; food, the most urgent requirement of [mankind], was to be conserved. The producer wished to lay by stocks for his own consumption; consumers were anxious to secure supplies. Employees of big industries wished to feed their employees. Essential services had to be maintained. Traders knew that money could be made. The marketable quantity had diminished. The combination of these formidable factors created unprecedented conditions. A series of calamities, each one of unprecedented magnitude, followed in such quick succession that the administration was overwhelmed."


 * 1) Lede (4)
 * 2)  Background  (4)
 * 3)  Subinfeudation and land tenureship  (3)
 * 4)  War-time distress  (1)
 * 5)  Inter-provincial trade barriers  (2)
 * 6)  Japanese invasion of Burma  (2)
 * 7)  Denial of Rice, Denial of Ships  (2)
 * 8)  Inaccurate crop statistics  (3)
 * 9)  Natural disasters  (4)
 * 10)  A crisis in two waves
 * 11)  Starvation
 * 12)  State interventions in the food market
 * 13)  Displacement and epidemics
 * 14)  Displacement
 * 15)  Epidemics
 * 16)  Prices
 * 17)  Aftermath
 * 18)  Debate over primary cause
 * 19)  News reports and literature

November he could inform the India Office in London that operations were already underway. Commander in Charge of the Eastern Command, General Mosley Mayne was put in general charge of military aid to Bengal and Major-General A.V. T. Wakely, was put in command of the all-important movement of supplies. At their disposal was a full Division of British troops, comprised of 15,000 soldiers. Military lorries, priority rail arrangements, and the Royal Air Force, all of which were already well represented in the region, were also deployed. Major-General Wakely, putting the lie to statements made both by the Bengal Government and the later Famine Enquiry Commission report, was able to quickly hire 7,000 country boats on contract to facilitate the movement of relief into remote, [river]ine districts.

Evidence in the famines literature and elsewhere also suggests that an effective social safety net for protecting poor households from severe shocks is consistent with longer-term goals of economic growth and environmental protection. Arguments that greater current security against famine can promote growth have come from two main sources. [First], it can be argued that credit constraints make it difficult for survivors to restore their productive assets after the famine, entailing irreversible lasting damage to livelihoods (Jodha, 1975; Agarwal, 1991; Osmani, 1996). Yet without an adequate safety net some will be forced into drawing down their productive assets. There is some evidence that famines have resulted in an increase in wealth inequality, through increased concentration of land ownership (Khan, 1977; Alamgir, 1980; both on Bangladesh) and livestock in pastoral regions of Africa (Osmani, 1996). Thus, after the famine the economy will have a higher number of credit-constrained households who are unable to take up productive investments in physical and human capital. There is some evidence from cross-country studies that higher initial inequality entails lower subsequent growth rates (see the Bruno et al., 1995, survey).

Two background notes are necessary here. [First], in Bengal and other eastern regions of India, the farmers ordinarily grew three rice crops. The main one was the aman crop, planted in summer and harvested in December, which provided about two-thirds to three-quarters of the year's supply. The secondary crop, the aus crop, was planted in spring and harvested in fall, providing about one-quarter to one-third of

previous epiphytotics, none of which reached the scale of 1942, but which provided information on the way this disease would develop and spread. The disease usually appeared [first] in the mature aus crop in August and September, and this infestation "must have provided the necessary multiple foci for spread and infection of the later aman varieties."35 His table shows the 1942 infestation followed the characteristic pattern.

the man starved. Sen's argument in this case is one of emphasis, however, and since reason and cause are almost identical concepts, Sen's last sentence could be rewritten: "The increased food prices most immediately caused this man's starvation because they reduced his exchange entitlement, but the reason why the prices increased was the food shortage." The rephrased statement prioritizes the food shortage and makes the entitlement problem a result of that shortage, which in fact occurred [first].43 Padmanabhan, writing years earlier, made a similar emphasis in a sentence that could have been written in response to Sen: "Though administrative failures were immediately responsible for this human suffering, the principal cause of the short crop production in 1942 was the epidemic of helminthosporium disease which attacked the rice crop in that year."44

In terms of causation, there can be no doubt that the plant disease-induced crop failure must be recognized as the cause of the crisis in Bengal, because it damaged the plants and reduced the harvest before the prices skyrocketed. Prices peaked, and destitution and starvation intensified only after the harvest of that aman crop. Causation [first] of all concerns chronology and consequences, and there can be no doubt that the crop failure took place before the peak of the famine and rice prices, both of which can be seen as results of the crop failure.45

Linlithgow was also committed to observing the new Indian Constitution of 1935, which allotted autonomy to provincial governments, and when the Bengal famine emerged he was reluctant to interfere in the province. In the [first] months of 1943, that government fell into disarray because of political squabbles and the illness of the British governor John Herbert, and the Central Government became involved in aiding famine relief efforts with the limited reserves it had. By then, however, Linlithgow was at the end of the third extension of his term, which Churchill had demanded of him, and was preparing to be replaced. During his term he had contended with Gandhi's "Quit India" movement, demands from the Muslim League and many other groups, the Japanese invasion, as well as the internal economic crises.

The conventional view of the Bengal famine as a "man-made famine" that had no origins in shortage is not only inaccurate but also unjustly narrow and oversimplified. The real crisis was much broader and more complex. Government officials at all levels faced a series of simultaneous crises with inadequate resources. Traders increased prices simultaneously with monsoon failures, cyclones, and crop failures, and all of these events were more widespread than the conventional interpretation envisages. The Bengal crisis did not at [first] appear as serious as it became later. The subsistence crises also occurred simultaneously with internal political and military crises.


 * Uneconomic Cultivator, Dantwala, Indian Journal of Agricultural economics, august 1949.
 * A study in agricultural backwardness under semi-feudalism,Amit Bhaduri, The Economic Journal, Vol. 83, No. 329 (Mar., 1973), pp. 120-137
 * Stagnant agricultural productivity
 * risk diffusion, interlinked contracts
 * jotedar white collar jobs but landowner status

Four possible reasons have in turn been proposed for the lack of investment: subinfeudation that caused a dilution of potential returns, a semi-feudalistic relationship between landlords and tenants that made activities  other than agricultural investment more profitable, the lack of a process of profound social and economic transformations analogous to those of the Industrial Revolution.

timeline

 * In July 1941 Japanese assets in the Empire were frozen. On 28th July Japan invaded Indo-China. On 8th December war broke out. There were air raids on Rangoon on 23rd [January 1942] and on 7th March Rangoon fell. On l5th February Singapore fell.
 * The famine revealed itself [first] in the districts away from Calcutta, starting early in 1943. Its progress can be watched in the reports of the Commissioners and District Officers all over the province. Beginning with descriptions of'hunger marches organised by communists' on 28 December 1942, a selection of the reports include: 'people having to go without food' (10 February); 'indications of distress among local people' (27 February) ; 'acute distress prevails' (26 March) : 'crime against property increasing, and paddy looting cases have become frequent' (28 March);'major economic catastrophe apprehended' (27 April); 'economic conditions approach a crisis' (13 May);
 * The extremely awkward timing of the Bengal crisis from a British military standpoint helps explain why Secretary of State Amery acted as if he believed that denying the true extent of the problem would make it go away. During the [first] half of 1943 Amery repeatedly downplayed the gravity of the crisis in the House of Commons. On 28 January he repeated a statement from the Indian government that "there is no famine and no widespread prevalence of acute shortage." On 5 May he noted that Bengal's problem was "primarily one for the Ministry of that self-governing province," and when Labour MP Reginald Sorensen, a critic of British rule in India, asked him whether famine conditions had not reduced people to "eating new grass," he replied that he had "not been informed of that." At the beginning of July Amery was still holding to the mantra that there was "no overall shortage of foodgrains," while conceding that the "plans elaborated by the Food Department of the Government of India earlier in the year [had] been less successful than was hoped." A fortnight later he attributed "the present difficult situation" to "a widespread tendency of cultivators to withhold foodgrains from the market, to larger consumption per head as the result of increased family income, to hoarding by consumers and others," and to the lack of interprovincial grain movements. In a short statement on 23 September he conceded the role of "a poor rice crop in Bengal"; but in reply to Sorensen's insistence that "until recently an impression was given to the general public that the shortage in India was not so severe as obviously had been the case and [that] it was largely if not entirely due to hoarding," Amery, by now clearly unconvinced of his stance, still held that "the problem is undoubtedly, in the main, one of distribution." At which point another Labour member, Emmanuel Shinwell, exclaimed, "could there be anything worse than disclaiming responsibility?"36

before 1942

 * On 29 November 1941 the central government conferred, by notification, concurrent powers on the provincial governments under the Defence of India Rules (DIR) to restrict/prohibit the movement of food grains and also to requisition both food grains and any other commodity they considered necessary. With regard to food grains, the provincial governments had the power to restrict/stop, seize them and regulate their price, divert them from their usual channels of transportation and, as stated, their movement.

January 1942

 * Linlithgow also repeatedly sent Churchill and the War Cabinet in London insistent demands for immediate and substantial food shipments, accompanied by descriptions of famine conditions from Provincial and regional officials. The War Cabinet initially resisted allocating shipping from war material to food for India but ultimately sent a few shipments in 1943. Sen and other writers criticize the British for these delays and compromises in arranging this shipping, but this decision has to be viewed in the context of the Nazi and Japanese attacks and the Allies' efforts to resist them. During the first six months of 1943 these attacks lost the Allies and neutrals more than 2.1 million tons of shipping. In the Indian Ocean alone from [January 1942] to May 1943, the Axis powers sank 230 British and Allied merchant ships totaling 873,000 tons, in other words, a substantial boat every other day.104 British hesitation to allocate shipping concerned not only potential diversion of shipping from other war-related needs but also the prospect of losing the shipping to attacks without actually helping India at all.

February 1942

 * The Fourth Price Control Conference met on 6th/7th [February 1942]. (A day previously the Rice Conference had met at the instance of the Bihar Government. At this Conference Bihar and Assam had expressed the opinion that provincial control of exports would lead to chaos.) By then the problems had "become more complicated, their solutions were more urgent and the administrative difficulties greater than they had ever been." Bans "had been out by certain Administrations, both Provincial and State, on the movements of commodities", the President (Sir Bamaswami Mudaliar) remarked "At ﬁrst ﬂush it looks as if such a ban was eminently justiﬁed and that the Provincial or State authority concerned had a duty towards the population in its charge ' to see that the movement of goods, when scarcity conditions were about to prevail, was checked so far as its area was concerned, that is to say, that foodstuffs available within the area are not transported beyond its border. One or two Provincial Governments have done it; and some States have done it; and I must also admit with thankfulness that some Provincial Administrations have stoutly resisted the temptation to put such a ban 1 Perhaps this referred to Price Control only. comlast.txt
 * When the Fourth Price Control Conference met in [February 1942], the invasion of Burma had already begun and the dangers were becoming more obvious. The Government of Bihar were concerned about the effect of the possible loss of rice imports from Burma, and at their instance representatives of the Governments of the Eastern Region and of the Government of the Central Provinces met on the day preceding the conference to discuss the regulation of prices and supplies. various measures, including price control, were discussed at this meeting but complete agreement was not reached. At the conference on the following day, discussion centred round price control and it was generally agreed that prices might have to be controlled in the near future. The distribution of the supplies available in India was not discussed.comm-92ff.txt
 * From [February 1942] onwards, British officials in India became fearful of a possible Japanese attack from Burma and initiated a withdrawal of government offices from the coastal and eastern areas of Bengal. It is far from clear who made the crop estimates in these "denial" areas. In others, district-level officials gauged the area under cultivation as well as probable yields. Tauger (2009) notes, however, that these administrative personnel had no expert knowledge of agriculture and could easily have missed the subtle signs of infestation by helminthosporium oryzae that agronomists believe devastated the ultimate crop.
 * Calcutta Corporation workers, whose strike in March of 1940 for wartime "dearness allowances" had ended in police firings and minimal wage concessions, again threatened a strike for access to subsidized foodstuffs in [February 1942]. In response this time, however, the Corporation opened food stores to sell rice and other staples to its employees at concession rates.11 This kept sweepers, waste workers and other essential city services working throughout the period, an outcome well known to be necessary to the prosecution of war. But labor unrest was widespread. In January, 4,400 thousand workers of the Hastings Jute Mills went on strike, and in February 15,000 workers of the Andrew Yule Mills walked out, demanding "dearness allowances" and preferential access to rice.

March 1942

 * On March 3rd of 1942, the Government of India, fully cognizant of mounting difficulties, advised the Bengal Chamber of Commerce that "industrial concerns should adopt the practice of making themselves responsible for feeding their employees."13 Toward this end it was recommended that industrial firms should keep three months of food grains in stock at all times.
 * Barriers continued to be put up. In [March 1942], the Central Provinces, after a scramble for rice, had stopped export of foodgrains to places outside the 7 province. The Government of India had in some cases issued directions against such steps. hussain_minute

April 1942

 * In [April 1942], the Government of India convened a conference for examining the problems of food production, and the question of the arrangements necessary for the maintenance of the distribution of supplies between provinces and states was discussed at this conference. The need for the establishment of a central authority for regulating distribution was recognized, and the dangers inherent in the control of exports by individual provinces and states, with reference only to their own needs and Without adequate co-ordination by a central authority, were prominently emphasized.comm-92ff.txt
 * When the Food Production Conference met in [April 1942] the question of barriers came up for a good deal of discussion. comlast.txt
 * It was not till the end of [April 1942], that the Wheat Control Order was issued regulating the rail-borne movement of wheat from producing provinces to consuming areas. IARIHDD8
 * A new instrument, titled the 'weekly epidemiological telegrams', was introduced in [April 1942] to keep an eye on the progress of these diseases in eastern India." The telegram, dated 24 [April 1942], declared that 'The Directors of Public Health send, in their weekly telegrams, only the total figures for their respective provinces for each of the diseases cholera, smallpox and plague; but, in view of the continuous flow of evacuees from Burma, the Directors of Public Health in Bengal and Assam are supplying, at our request, figures for districts in order to enable us to keep a watch on the progress of the epidemics.
 * Local inflation started in south-eastern Bengal in [April 1942], the month of the introduction of evacuation and boat denial policy and it increased in the following months. But how exactly are we to connect inflation to the boat denial policy?
 * In [April 1942], the Japanese sank several merchantmen in the Bay of Bengal, as well as a destroyer,

May 1942

 * in Kolkata the price of rice was Rs. 6.25 per maund in [May 1942], it reached to Rs.30 per maund in May 1943. This article argues that the high price of rice had strong connection to the "boat denial. policy and thus offer understudied clues to the cause of the famine.3
 * In short, the "Boat Denial" policy was formulated by the British administration to deny a possibly invading Japanese army the access to boats to prevent them from entering India through Bengal. Introduced in [May 1942], the administration withdrew any boats capable of carrying more than ten persons.
 * Sen considers the boat denial policy to have been a cause of the famine (1984 p4611; 1980b p619). In [May 1942] orders were issued for the removal of boats capable of carrying more than 10 passengers from the coastal areas of Bengal in order to deny them to the Japanese if they invaded. The Famine Commission was very critical of the Bengal Government for their operation of the scheme (FIC pp26, 27), as it reduced fish catches and made transport difficult, hampering relief measures. Both the Indian Government and the Bengal Government considered that physical distribution was a serious constraint on relief measures.
 * The army had also dismantled the railways in some areas for fear of the Japanese using them and by [May 1942] there was report of dismantling of 817 miles of track..
 * In addition to carrying out these decisions, major civilian officials from coastal regions were withdrawn to safer places, mostly in Kolkata. These developments meant that for a few months since [May 1942], a major portion of Bengal was dominated neither by the British administration, nor by the Japanese, but by the specter of an invading army which never arrived. Yet the Japanese army was not outright heading to Chittagong. Of three major lines of command, the closest was heading to Assam moving along the Irrawaddy river and using the water transports.
 * By orders issued in [May 1942] boats capable of carrying more than ten passengers were removed from a vast area of river-based Bengal, to 'deny' them to the possibly-arriving Japanese, and this interfered with both river transport and fishing (see Famine Inquiry Commission, 1945A, pp. 26-27).f Thus the distress of fishermen cannot be judged by looking only Table 5. Indices of exchange rates vis-à-vis rice at retail prices: Bolpur in Birbhum district Mid-month
 * The 'boat denial' policy was coupled with a 'rice denial' policy initiated in [May 1942], aimed also at the elusive Japanese; rice stocks were removed from certain coastal districts (viz. Bakarganj, Khulna and Midnapore). While the amount involved was not very large—about 40,000 tons altogether—and the rice thus bought and removed was later sold mostly within Bengal (chiefly in Calcutta), it did con tribute to local scarcities.
 * When food prices began to rise early in the war, government officials widely assumed that big traders had large hoards and from [May 1942], with the Foodgrains Control Order, applied a series of policies to expose them.60 During spring 1943 the central authorities introduced free trade in rice first in the eastern region (Bengal and its surrounding provinces) and then briefly in most of India. In this period of approximately three months, traders and official purchasers from Bengal traveled widely in the surrounding provinces (Orissa, Bihar, and Assam) seeking rice and driving up prices in those regions drastically. They still acquired only some 91,000 tons of food grains, which was a small amount that had negligible impact on prices in Bengal. 61
 * The Foodgrains Control Order of [May 1942] required traders to report their holdings to the government, and the food drives found traders' holdings corresponded to their reports under this law.63.
 * Japan took over Burma in an intense campaign that began in mid-January and ended with the conquest of Rangoon and northern Burma by mid-[May 1942]. The British widely applied scorched-earth policies; the Japanese resorted to considerable atrocities, and after their victory stopped rice exports from the Burma and ordered many farmers to switch from rice to cotton and other crops.81

June 1942

 * There was delay in the establishment by the Government of India. of a system of planned 'movement of supplies. The Bengal Government failed to secure control over supply and distribution and widespread famine followed a rise of prices to abnormal levels—to ﬁve to six times the prices prevailing in the early months of 1942. This rise in prices was the second basic cause of the 'famine. Famine, in the form in which it occurred, could have been prevented by resolute action at the right time to ensure the equitable distribution of available supplies. 8. The Government 0! Dew—When the price of rice rose steeply in May and [June 1942]', the Government of Bengal endeavoured to bring the situation under control by the prohibition of exports and by ﬁxing statutory maximum prices. In the absence of control- over supplies, price control failed, comm-92ff
 * In [June 1942], the Bengal Government issued an order fixing maximum prices for rice. "The immediate effect of the price control order was that supplies disappeared." It was therefore decided not to withdraw the order but to make known informally to the trade that the control prices would not be enforced except in cases of gross profiteering.
 * Another modification came in [June 1942] when it became apparent to Pinnell that the so called "inner boat route. to Kolkata must be kept open. This boat route was a system of small rivers and canals, connecting Kolkata with the Khulna district, which was fairly well connected by the rivers and waterways of eastern Bengal.17 This modification seems to be more problematic because not only this was done in a view to keeping supply line from east Bengal to Kolkata open, but it was also done at the expense of other cross-channels of supply. It was like accumulation of water from all over in order to drain them through one single channel.
 * Most of the registered excess famine mortality in the towns was not due to malaria — although deaths from this disease did increase (see Table 5.8). Instead the "all other" category was prominent. The drastic fall in the relative importance of respiratory diseases in the towns during the famine is also rather striking.^ Given that towns attracted destitutes during the famine, many starvation deaths may have been recorded in this unspecific category. The Public Health Commissioner for India in his report for 1943 and 1944 gave the recorded numbers of deaths of "destitutes" in Calcutta - "those persons who died and whose bodies were disposed of by public arrangement" - as follows: 3,000 deaths between [June 1942] and May 1943; and 19,000 deaths between June 1943 and May 1944.^

July 1942

 * A quantity of rice was exported (187,500 tons in the year, of which 184,618- tons were exported between January and [July 1942]). comlast
 * The signs of famine became visible about [July 1942], and its worst effects in the form of epidemics continued until December, 1944. The total number of deaths in these years has been estimated at 3,335,000 deaths which, reduced by the quinquennial normal average of about 540,000 deaths annually, gives the foregoing official figure of deaths from the famine.
 * This upset the markets of North Bihar and prices rose. Bihar is normally a deficit province and these abnormal exports to the United Provinces caused alarm. Again, the high prices in the United Provinces made it impossible for the Bihar Government to maintain prices throughout Bibar in priority with those fixed in Bengal. The Bihar Government therefore decided to Prohibit the exports of rice to allY market outside the province by rail, road or river, except under permit. This prohibition took effect from the 1st .[July 1942].IARIHDD8-001362.
 * In the beginning of 1942, prices of rice began to rise in Calcutta and, as we shall see later, the Government of Bengal decided to fix maximum prices with effect Lrom the 1st [July 1942]. The Bihar Government accepted those prices and deeidt1d to adjust their own maximum prices in parity with them. Prices, however, suddenly rose in the United Provinces and unusually large quantities of. dce began to be exported from Bihar to that province.IARIHDD8-001362.txt

August 1942

 * Finally, reference must be made to the political disturbances which started in [August 1942]. Apart from the fact that they claimed the attention of Government at a time when the development of the food situation required all their special attention, they added to the difficulties of securing public co-operation and maintaining public confidence.. The fact that the disturbances took place in the district of Midnapore where the cyclone. had caused such serious damage to life and property was a most unfortunate combination of events in Apart of the province which suffered seriously in 1943.IARIHDD8-001362
 * The famine records of the Government of Bengal Revenue Department and Department of Civil Supplies (DCS) have not been located in the West Bengal Archives. Most of the documentation in this paper comes from (1) the papers of L. G. Pinnell, who was director of the DCS from [August 1942] to April 1943 and prepared much of the Government of Bengal's submission to the FIC;
 * The experience was quite different in Calcutta. The official policy was based on the firm conviction that 'the maintenance of essential food supplies to the industrial area of Calcutta must be ranked on a very high priority among their [the government's] war time obligations', and as early as [August 1942] the Bengal government had explained to the Bengal Chamber of Commerce that as far as Calcutta was concerned the government promised to do 'all  in their power to create  conditions  under  which  essential supplies may be  obtainable  in adequate  quantities and  at  reasonable prices'.
 * Throughout the first half of 1943, the Bengal administration had publicly claimed that there was enough grain to ward off famine – to keep up public morale, deter hoarding, and rationalise its ongoing appropriation of food for the war effort in India and abroad. As early as [August 1942], Bengal's then chief minister, A K Fazlul Huq, had warned of approaching famine because of the government's scorched-earth policy in eastern and coastal Bengal, but he was deposed by the governor, John Herbert, for his refusal to toe the line on this and other issues (Huq 1944: 15-16).
 * Linlithgow had repeatedly and urgently warned Amery that inflationary financing of the war effort was causing the Indian economy to collapse, and in [August 1942] his emissary had informed the war cabinet in London of the possibility of famine in India arising from inflation alone (Mansergh II: 590).
 * The Bengal National Chamber of Commerce, representing all the major jute mills, the Paper Makers Association, the Engineering Association, the Tramways, and other industries in the province, initiated its "Chambers Foodstuff Scheme" in late [August 1942]. According to this scheme, the Chamber began making large purchases of rice and paddy from districts and supplying it to its members directly for the first time. Constituent firms, meanwhile, continued bulk purchases on their own accounts, doubling down on the most essential commodity in the province.

September 1942

 * On September 14th, in Dinajpur, north Bengal, a crowd of as many as 10,000 villagers armed with lathis and other weapons, attacked government buildings and looted hoards of rice and paddy from stockists in the countryside. 133 Two weeks later a similar crowd gathered in Jalpaiguri, the chief grievance being a scarcity of paddy in the locality.
 * Collector N. M. Khan and his men were already in a desperate position because of the outbreak of violence on September 29 (GBH 1943:16-28). Blood was shed on both sides, and in Contai and Tamluk congressmen set up a parallel government that provided some relief to cyclone victims (Council of Action, BPCC, 1942:10-12; Samanta et al. 1946:32-39). Hostility to the British was so strong among the dominant Mahishya community that even the cyclone did not turn it back, and armed pressure was required to quell the rebellion (Greenough 1982:90-92).

January 1943
There were demands for rationing in Calcutta and other urban centres as early as January 1943, and in mid-February the Bengal legislature debated a demand for supplementary funding that included provision under the heading 'Famine' for relief measures in the cyclone-affected areas. In another debate in March one deputy demanded that Bengal be declared a 'deficit province', while another reckoned that the 'estimated production' of rice was 23 per cent short of needs and that the 'shiploads of wheat' promised some months earlier had never materialized. In late March a correspondent for the Calcutta Statesman [news]paper reported that a 'large proportion' of the

February 1943

 * 1943 was ambiguous on the issue. In early January 1943 its agriculture and industries minister, the Nawab Bahadur of Dacca, sought to reassure consumers by claiming that although the 1942 aman crop was less than the previous year's, it was no worse than that of 1940. In February, however, the nawab announced that estimated rice production in 1942/3 (6.9 million tons) was far short of consumption requirements (9.3 million), an assessment that caused the price of rice to rise significantly. His statement, according to the Communist weekly [news]paper People's War, "encouraged hoarding right and left."72 In March the nawab revealed that Bengal was also short of other essential foodstuffs, "namely wheat, dal [dried legumes], mustard, sugar, and salt." As for rice, the loss of Burmese imports, military demands, the so-called "denial policy" which had led to the requisitioning of stocks in areas vulnerable to Japanese attack, and "hoarding on a fairly extensive scale" had produced local shortages.73
 * Confidential memoranda and correspondence between those in high places during the crisis imply from early on that Bengal was suffering from reduced food availability.74 [74 Take, for example, the warning by Bengal's representative at the Delhi food conference of [Feb. 1943] that market supplies were one-fifth below normal; or the subsequent memorandum submitted to the Cabinet on 5 March 1943, stating that Bengal 'as a whole' was suffering from a 'serious shortage', and that 'unless the available supply could somehow be spread over till the next crop, famine was to be expected in certain areas' (both are mentioned in BL, OIOC, MS Eur. D911/8DCS, Bengal: 'Method of obtaining and compiling statistics of crop production').]

May 1943
In May 1943, Suhrawardy asked [news]paper editors to preach the 'doctrine of sufficiency and sufficiency and sufficiency... ad nauseam' against the 'psychological factors' of 'greed and panic'.66 [66 BL, Oriental and India Office Collections (hereafter OIOC), Pinnell Papers, MS Eur. 911/9. ]

June 1943
on the 17th of June that Field-Marshall Archibald Wavell, then Commander- in-Chief of Armed Forces in Asia, had been selected to replace Linlithgow as the next Viceroy and Governor-General of India.

July 1943

 * On July 2nd Bengal Governor, John Herbert, sent an apologetic letter to the Viceroy to convey some inconvenient [news]. "I am sorry to have to trouble you with so dismal a picture," he wrote, but "Bengal is rapidly approaching starvation."56 Reports of deaths were being received from all districts, and the situation, he informed the Viceroy,
 * Calcutta saw  the famine mainly in the form  of masses  of rural destitutes, who  trekked from  the  districts  into  the city;  by July 1943  the  streets  were  full.

August 1943
The imposition of price controls on 20 August 1943 led to rice shortages even in Calcutta. Many dealers found it virtually impossible to obtain rice; others disposed of their stocks before the order came into effect and did not replenish them because they could not even purchase rice at Rs. 30 per maund, the maximum sale price. The ordinance also forced many rice dealers to close shop. Meanwhile Suhrawardy continued to warn traders against withholding stocks from the market.

prioritize

 * Moreover, the authorities prioritized the city of Calcutta, where many workers were engaged in war-related production, over the rest of the province. More than half of India's war-related output was produced in Calcutta by an army of workers numbering up to one million,"made up to a considerable extent of a volatile class recruited from outside Bengal."4 Concern for the city's "priority classes" accounted for the forcible requisition of rice from mills and warehouses in and around the city in late December 1942.5
 * Another group to be accorded great prominence throughout 1942-45 was the unskilled labour force involved in various military and civilian building projects carried out in eastern India. This group was recruited from specific tribal regions of Bihar, Bengal and Orissa. In [March 1942], therefore, the Indian Government's Labour Department set up Provincial Labour Supply Committees in these provinces, which were responsible for regularizing employment levels. This was achieved by the creation of district and regional committees, manned by local bureaucrats, to organize 'facilities and amenities' for labourers and their households. " The benefits offered took the form of free food, money (in addition to any arrears in pay on return to the village), medical attention, and free transport by train and bus (private bus operators were assigned stocks of petrol for the purpose) to 'roadside places nearer their homes' . 25 In Bihar, the immediate effect of the formation of the new committees was to allow the Sub-Divisional Officers in the Santal Parganas to arrange specific projects intended to arrange food, medical care and shelter for all returning labourers at government camps, 26 and their counterparts in Ranchito supply medicines to the hospital in Lohardaga and free food for those workers who had been taken sick while working in the eastern front or during repatriation to their villages. " Such schemes, and the required scale of recruitment, were regularized and developed through 1943, notably by the introduction of mobile rationing and medical units, financed by a combination of central and provincial funds and provisioned by the Indian Government's Food Department and the office of the Director General of the IMS. During the period of the famine in Bengal, the Commissioner of the ChotaNagpur Division, was like his divisional counterparts in Orissa and Bengal, given access to a special fund of Rs 100 000, which was intended to allow the quick provision of relief, without 'undue paperwork', in case of a sudden emergency. " In addition, chains of dispensaries were created for the purpose of treating labourers working in building projects in the frontier regions of Assam and Bengal. "

Across India, "essential workers" of private and government wartime industries, workers in military and civilian construction, the Indian Railways, and government workers of various levels benefited from ration cards, a network of shops which provided essential supplies at discounted rates, and direct, preferential allocation of supplies. Private industries considered essential in Bihar and Bengal included coal and mica mining concerns as well as tea plantations; these received water, medical care (including in particular antimalarial supplies), subsidized food, free transportation, access to superior housing, regular wages and even "mobile cinema units catering to recreational needs". Any civilian population who were not members of these groups (in particular, laborers in rural areas) received severely reduced access to food and medical care, and this limited access was principally available only to those who arrived at "cities and selected district towns". Outside of these selected locations, "...vast areas of rural eastern India were denied any lasting state-sponsored distributive schemes" for food and medical aid.

The predominant policy ever since the outbreak of the war had been to strengthen the military medical establishment at the expense of the civilian sector. This affected all branches of Indian medicine, both public and private, especially when it became apparent th at the Indian medical Service (IMS) and the Indian medical Department (IMD) were not going to be able to fulfil the military's requirements. The result was the recruitment of a number of 'special categories' of medical officers, which included, among other things, the recruitment of European doctors in India and Britain (October 1940), the transfer of assistant-surgeons in the IMD to the IMS under the emergency commissioning scheme (June 1941), the introduction of medical graduates in state-managed and company-managed railways(October1941),theemployment of specialists on special terms([January 1942]),the introduction of women medical practitioners ([January 1942]) and the transfer of civilian antimalaria officers to military duty(February 1942). The enduring shortages of medical personnel finally forced the authorities todrawon medical licentiates, operating amongcivilian establishments, in1943.Thisforcedthecreationofacompletely new medical service within the army, allowing 'inferior' medical qualifications to be accommodated. This body, the Indian Army medical Corps, pulled more practitioners out of the civilian medical services, thereby weakening it further.2.22.23.txt

subinfeudation
Did subinfeudation cause a lack of investment in agricultural capital, or did a lack of returns on investment in agricultural capital cause subinfeudation? "The Anglo-Indian legal system... rested on two contradictory principles... [Colonial] law.. especially with regard to the rule of law and the nature of property rights... sought to... free the individual [to seek maximization of profits] in a world of amoral market relations.. [while] Hindu social tradition [had] conventions [which] interfered with the rights of the individual to possess, acquire, use and accumulate property, especially land." "The cost of this impotence,from the perspective of capital, was to reduce the pressures of competition at work in the market and the possibility of investment in the means of production. If landlords could not charge competition rents what forces drove peasants to increase production? If they could not re-possess their tenants' lands, why should they invest in improving them? If urban and mercantile capitalists did not possess the ultimate sanction of being able to seize their defaulting debtors' lands, how could they impose the rhythms of the market on production? Indeed, without this sanction, what kind of security was offered them to invest at all?"

Subinfeudation began as a direct result of certain provisions of the Permanent Settlement, and accelerated substantially after the Bengal Tenancy Act (1885) and a series of later amendments,   the 1920s, the Great Depression, and accelerated again during the famine of 1943. This process created a complicated pyramid of land rights relationships:

"What many... landlords... did was to sell off the right to collect rents in exchange for a fixed return. The sub-proprietors, or the buyers of such rights, in turn passed off the risk by selling the  rights to another layer of intermediaries in lieu of a fixed return.  Very soon layers and layers of intermediaries were spawned. A  remarkably active market for rental rights had surfaced... These intermediaries had no reason to show much interest  in raising the productivity of land as the share that would accrue  to them of the rise in output would have been minuscule. The burden of the huge and intricate architecture of intermediaries of  course rested on the actual cultivators placed at the bottom of the  pyramid."

Lack of Industrial Revolution
In Bengal there are three seasons of rice paddy production: the boro crop planted in the winter and harvested in spring, the aus crop, planted in early spring and harvested in July or August, and the aman crop, planted in late spring and harvested in the winter months. Because the aman crop is planted just prior to the monsoon season, and receives rain-fed irrigation throughout its maturation, it is the most consistent and abundant of the three crops, accounting for at least 75% of the total paddy production in Bengal.32 Once the aman crop had been consumed or marketed, however, a long season of hardship often followed. According to Ishpahani, "the Bengal cultivator, [even] before the war, had three months of feasting, five months of subsistence diet and four months of starvation."33

... though the landlords were not fulfilling their economic role they were allowed to obtain... enhancement of rent on many grounds.

"The British probably did not frustrate an industrial breakthrough that was otherwise highly likely, as some nationalist scholars claim, but nineteenth-century changes may have made such a breakthrough even more difficult than it would have been otherwise and more difficult than the transition faced by either western European economies or east Asian ones."

The Industrial revolution induced landlords in England to "make productive investment in agriculture". During this period, the number of English households whose primary income was derived from agriculture dropped significantly, and large segments of the labor force (primarily many of the artisans whose work was relatively more labor-intensive, but also peasants) moved into other industries. Land owners used enclosure to consolidate numerous, small patches of farmland of the existing open field system into a much smaller number of much larger tracts. In the open field system, crops had been grown largely for subsistence agriculture, but crops were now grown primarily as a market good to meet the increased domestic demand from the growing labor class rather than a resource for personal consumption. Since these farmers had no control over the larger market demand for their goods, the principal avenue they had for increasing profits was through increasing crop yields; this dynamic created considerable financial incentive for investment in supplies and technology to increase agricultural productivity.

This period was roughly coterminous with the Company rule in India, but the development of India in general and Bengal in particular took a starkly different turn from England's case. Industrialization in colonial India was was largely delayed until the early twentieth century, and did not trigger the same massive social and economic transformations as it had in the west. Unlike the contemporaneous Enclosure movement in Britain, agriculture in Bengal remained the province of the subsistence farming of innumerable small paddy fields. In the decades before World war II, the limited degree of industrialization in Bengal was mainly devoted to producing goods needed by Britain for World War II, the percentage of households deriving their livelihood mainly or solely from agriculture was high, and average size of landholdings was quite small: "In England the percentage of the population in agriculture declined from about 60–80 per cent at the end of the seventeenth century to 36 per cent at the beginning of the nineteenth and 7 per cent in 1921. On the other hand, the percentage of total population dependent on agriculture in Bengal was as high as 77.3 per cent in 1921. Once again, whereas the average size of a holding was 111 acres in England, it was only six acres in Bengal."

Essentially, the process of industrialization in India was too late and too weak to be the engine of social change that would have resulted in increased investment in productivity in the agricultural sector, or gains in efficiency that would have resulted from consolidation of arable land plots. This dynamic was further compounded by the fragmentation of land rights caused by subinfeudation.

(Pomeranz) "India was not a very likely site for an industrial breakthrough". The caste system limited the options for escape via occupational and geographic mobility from occupations reliant on depleted resources. "The subcontinent underwent what Bayly calls 'peasantization,' as both formerly migratory peoples and former handicraft workers were increasingly drawn—and pushed—into sedentary farming. The process appears to have begun before colonialism"

(Pomeranz) "The British probably did not frustrate an industrial breakthrough that was otherwise highly likely, as some nationalist scholars claim, but nineteenth- century changes may have made such a breakthrough even more difficult than it would have been otherwise and more difficult than the transition faced by either western European economies or east Asian ones."

(Pomeranz) "...by the early twentieth century [India] had both the disadvantages of a densely populated zone and those of a zone with limited proto-industrial development and a limited internal market. This combination of problems occurred...through the preferences of colonial (and, to some extent, indigenous) authorities for settled populations, 'customary' law, agricultural and forest exports, and a captive market for the mother country's industrial goods. The result was an increasing emphasis on primary-product exports even amid great population growth— primary products often produced with labor that was no less coerced (and maybe more so) than in the least free areas of eighteenth-century India. Thus, despite considerable growth in agriculture and commerce, India may have become less well positioned for industrial-led transformative growth."

lack of incentives
(Bhaduri) The economic relationship between the ryot and jotedar itself introduces constraints which strongly discourage the jotedar landowner from investing in agricultural efficiency. First, the existing legal structure made it prohibitively difficult for jotedar to charge the ryot an extra rent for the use of improved techniques (p. 131; also see washbrook in the subinfeudation section!). This is probably the initial obstacle against introduction of improved technology. Meanwhile, the principal engine of the ryot's "slide into landlessness" (see dantwala) is debt, principally for non-productive consumption (weddings, etc.): A substantial portion of the kishan's legal share of the harvest is taken away immediately after the harvest as repayment of past debt with interest,' thus reducing his actual available balance of the harvest well below his legal share of the harvest. This does not usually leave the kishan with enough food to survive from this harvest to the next and the serious problem of survival from harvest to harvest can only be overcome by borrowing for consumption. This perpetuates the indebtedness of the kishan based on his regular requirements of consumption-loans.(p. 122) But ryot do not have access to formal credit markets as they have no capital, so their lenders are the jotedar who are their landlords.(p. 123) The latter charge excessive rates. The regular cycle of harvest determines rice prices; the jotedar refuses to lend to the ryot when prices are low, but only when they are high, ensuring a high rate of interest (p. 123 note 3): "In the local village market, the price of paddy shows wide seasonal fluctuations- the lowest prices are reached right after the harvest, while peak prices prevail sometime before the harvest. Having run out of his available balance of paddy from the last harvest, the kishan typically borrows at a time when the current market prices are very high, while he has to pay back just after the harvest when current market prices are at their lowest. All that the jotedar (i.e., landowner cum lender of paddy) does, is to make a forward contract of repayment in kind calculated at current market prices. This often implies a fantastically high rate of interest. (p. 123)" Thus the jotedar derives political and economic power from the twin exploitative modes of landownership and usury (p. 121) Investing in improving crop yields would improve the economic position of the ryot/kishan, perhaps even to the point of breaking the cycle of indebtedness.

Most contemporary commentators thought the Hindu-Muslim conflict a serious factor.

Misc
[OLD There was a widespread claim that there was the shortage was a fiction, that plenty of rice was available but traders stockpiled to make speculative profits. In fact, there was strong evidence that this was not so: extensive investigations by police, special branch and officials, backed up by rewards for information, found no examples; raids on traders found that they had significantly smaller trading stocks than they had in normal years. This was confirmed when there was no release of surplus stocks when the famine ended. Only if speculators had stored more than usual, and not released it during the famine year, would they have increased the number of deaths: there is ample evidence that they did not.]

The Working Class Cost of Living Index rose by 15% to 20% per annum from 1939–46 with a sharp rise in cities in famine districts in 1942/3 because of famine-level rice prices, returning to the average level afterwards.

"The famine of 1943 was thus not an accident like an earthquake but the culmination  of economic changes which were going on  even  in normal  times."

The enormous expansion of the Indian Army probably did not increase total food demand in India, but it did mean significantly more local demand in Bengal (up to 200,000 tons grain imported, as well as an unknown quantity of grain and a lot of fresh food bought in Bengal). However, the effects of army consumption in causing the famine was clearly limited, as 'the army, mainly wheat-eaters, consumed very little extra in relation to India's supplies, and the army in Bengal was supplied externally' In April and May there was a propaganda drive to convince the population that the high prices were not justified by the supply of food, the goal being that the propaganda would induce hoarders to sell their stocks. When these propaganda drives failed, there was a drive to locate hoarded stocks. H. S. Suhrawardy, Bengal's Minister of Civil Supplies from April 24, 1943, announced that there was no shortage of rice in Bengal and introduced a policy of intimidating ‘hoarders’: this caused looting, extortion and corruption but did not increase the amount of food on the market. When these drives continually failed to locate large stocks, the government realized that the scale of the loss in supply was larger than they had initially believed.


 * cyclone relief, general relief, gruel kitchens, workhouses

The Government of Bengal was slow to implement any relief measures. At at one stage in 1943 it limited its charity to save money, though the funds could have been obtained. The supporters of the two Bengal Governments involved, that of A. K. Fazlul Huq (December 1941 to March 1943) and of Khawaja Nazimuddin's Muslim League (April 1943 to March 1945) each held the other government responsible for the catastrophe, because of its inaction and corruption. Bengal's chief minister, A. K. Fazlul Huq, had warned of the risk of famine but he was ignored and replaced. The government had done almost nothing to prepare for famine, and critics noted "the feebleness of its moral and administrative standards".

During the course of the famine, 264 thousand tons of rice, 258 thousand tons of wheat and wheat products, and 55 thousand tons of millet were sent to Bengal from the rest of India and overseas in order to relieve the famine. One ton feeds 5.75 people for a year at normal consumption, perhaps 8.2 at emergency survival rates. Various guesses were that the rice production in Bengal was 1.2 – 2.5 million tons below the ten-year average.

Any imports would have had to come from Australia, North America or South America. Some supplies from Australia entered the region. The main constraint was shipping. The Battle of the Atlantic was at its peak from mid-1942 to mid-1943, with submarine wolf packs sinking so many ships that the Allies were on the verge of defeat, so shipping could not be spared for India.

By August 1943 Churchill refused to release shipping to send food to India.

Eventually there was a clear threat by the Government of India to force the elected governments to provide grain, when the new Viceroy, Archibald Wavell, who was a successful general, was about to take office. For the first time substantial quantities of grain started to move to Bengal.

The Indian Army and Allied troops acted only after Wavell became Viceroy and got permission from the Bengal Government. They had vehicles, fuel, men and administrators, which the civil authority did not, so they were much more effective than the civil authority in getting food to the starving outside Calcutta. For example, in November 1943 Wavell ordered the army to conduct large-scale famine relief efforts where "army officers were given the power to direct food and health measures amongst the worst affected sections of the rural poor, often in special refugee camps outside local bureaucratic control." The distribution was difficult and continued for five months after the November/December 1943 crop was harvested. Wavell also threatened to resign unless London sent more aid, prompting substantial wheat shipments in 1944. In September, Wavell was formally named Governor-General and Viceroy of India. Field Marshal Wavell arrived in India In October 1943 to assume the post of viceroy from Linlithgow

One of Wavell's first actions in office was to address the Bengal famine of 1943 by ordering the army to distribute relief supplies to the starving rural Bengalis. He attempted with mixed success to increase the supplies of rice to reduce the prices. The reported fall in the [birth]-rate in Bengal in 1948 from 28-0 (quinquennial average) to 188 means a loss of 500,000 to 600,000 [birth]s. While the accuracy of this ﬁgure may be questioned, there is no reason to doubt that [birth]s were greatly decreased in the Bengal famine, as in earlier famines. The decrease will inﬂuence the age composition of the population in future years and the curve of population growth. The latter will, of course, also be affected by the total famine mortality, and notably by the 01:01'iialitvy among females of all ages up to the end of the child-bearing pen. . 19. The falling-off in the number of live [birth]s during famine is presumably due largely to an increase in the incidence of abortion, miscarriage, and still-[birth] resulting from malnutrition and disease. It is well known that a woman's capacity to bear living children is impaired by malnutrition, while malaria frequently leads to abortion. The disruption of family life must also be an operative factor, particularly in the later stages of famine. D.-Couasn or uonram'rr 20. In Ma and June, 1943, the death rate began to rise in the districts of Bangpur, ymensingh, Bakarganj, Chittagong, Ncakhali, and Tipperah. The most striking increase was in Chittagong and the neighbouring district of Noakhali, where, after a steep rise in May, the number of deaths was twice the quinquennial average in June, and B to 4 times the average in July. It was in fact in these districts that the famine ﬁrst made itself evident. In July the reported death-rate was above the average in all districts except Hooghly, Jessore, and Malda. but the rise was of a comparatively small order. From August onwards, the number of deaths rose rapidly, reaching its peak in December. The actual numbers recorded monthly are shown below, in comparison with the quinquennial average. It will be noted that the famine mortality curve follows the quinquennial mortality curve, which also attained its highest point in December. This suggests that during the last few months of the year, the presence of famine accentuated the lethal elect of disease present in base: degree in normal ﬁnes.