Bengal famine of 1943

Bengal famine of 1943
Country	India
Location	Bengal
Period	1943–1944
Total deaths	2 million
Observations	Policy failure, war
Theory	Failure of exchange entitlements
Succeeded by	The Bihar famine of 1966

The Bengal famine of 1943 (Bengali: পঞ্চাশের মন্বন্তর) struck the Bengal. Province of pre-partition India. Estimates are that between 1.5 and 4 million people died of starvation, malnutrition and disease, out of Bengal’s 60.3 million population, half of them dying from disease after food became available in December 1943 As in previous Bengal famines, the highest mortality was not in previously very poor groups, but among artisans and small traders whose income vanished when people spent all they had on food and did not employ cobblers, carpenters, etc.

Background and possible causes

The food situation in India was tight from the beginning of the Second World War with a series of crop failures and localized famines which were dealt with successfully under the Indian Famine Codes. In Bengal in 1940-41 there was a small scale famine although quick action by the authorities prevented widespread loss of life. Food prices increased throughout India, and the Central Government was forced to undertaking meetings with local government officials and release regulations of price controls

The proximate cause of the famine was a reduction in supply, with some increase in demand. The winter 1942 ‘aman’ rice crop which was already expected to be poor or indifferent was hit by a cyclone and three tidal waves in October. 450 square miles were swept by tidal waves, 400 square miles affected by floods and 3200 square miles damaged by wind and torrential rain. Reserve stocks in the hands of cultivators, consumers and dealers were destroyed. This killed 14,500 people and 190,000 cattle. A fungus hit the weakened crop and this was reported to have had an even greater effect on yield than the cyclone.The fungus, Helminthosporium oryzae, destroyed 50% to 90% of some rice varieties.

It was argued that the normal carry over stocks did not exist in Bengal because 1941 was a short year and people started eating the December 1941 crop immediately 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.

Bengal had been a food importer for the last decade. Calcutta was normally supplied by Burma. The British Empire had suffered a disastrous defeat at Singapore in 1942 against the Japanese military, which then proceeded to invade Burma in the same year. Burma was the world's largest exporter of rice in the inter-war period. By 1940 15% of India's rice overall came from Burma, while in Bengal the proportion was slightly higher given the province's proximity to Burma. After the Japanese occupation of Burma in March 1942, Bengal and the other parts of India and Ceylon normally supplied by Burma had to find food elsewhere. However, there were poor crops and famine situations in Cochin, Trivandrum and Bombay on the West coast and Madras, Orissa and Bengal in the East. It fell on the few surplus Provinces, mainly the Punjab, to supply the rest of India and Ceylon.

India as a whole probably had a deficit, but exported small quantities to meet the urgent needs of the Indian Army abroad, and those of Ceylon.

Bengal’s food needs rose at the same time from the influx of refugees from Burma. 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'

The starvation in Bengal and elsewhere could have been prevented in part or in whole if those people in India with surplus food had made it available. Starvation could have been reduced towards the end of 1943 if people in other countries had made it available.

Lack of Statistics

Lack of statistics was an important cause of the failure to recognize and tackle the famine. It was known at the time that there were no meaningful production statistics and statistics were ‘hopelessly defective’. A revenue officer would guess at the area planted and probable yield for a750,000 acre [310,000 ha] area to give a crop forecast for that area. These forecasts were aggregated and ‘adjusted’ by successive levels of Department of Agriculture officials It is not known if the forecasts were adjusted after the cyclone, or on what basis this could be done. There were no measures of actual yields. Subsequent research done by the Indian Statistical Institute using statistically valid samples and crop cutting showed large errors, with survey estimates being between 47% and 153% of the official estimate. The discrepancies also vary from year to year, with the sample estimate of the jute crop being 2.6 % above the official estimate in 1941 and 52.6% above it in 1946. This rules out analysis based on the level of the production forecast and, in particular, on year to year differences in production forecasts.

The officials responsible for food, such as Pinell and Braund, used a wide range of other estimates, cross checking them against observable facts. They were able to make use of information revealed in mail censorship, reports from Special Branch, informers, other departments etc. They also used trade estimates – traders acted on their belief that there was a serious shortage and made a lot of money. The traders warned the Bengal Government of a famine situation.

There are some figures on shipping and rail deliveries of rice to Calcutta, but none on imports by Bengal as a whole – most trade being informal, by river boat. There are no statistics on public or private stocks, until some commercial stock figures were kept in 1943.

There are no statistics on the number of refugees from Burma, nor the refugees from Bengal, escaping war, bombing and famine. Details of military requirements and procurement have not been published. There is no indication of how much food the military provided to Bengali soldiers and war workers.

India did not provide food

Whatever the cause of the famine, deaths could only be prevented by supplies of food from elsewhere in India. This was not forthcoming.

In normal regional famines the Indian Government had provided the starving with money, and let the trade bring in grain which worked for regional famines, though this had been disastrous in Orissa in 1888 when, as in 1943, the shortage was not regional but national. In 1942, with the permission of the central government, trade barriers were introduced by the democratically elected Provincial governments. The politicians and civil servants of surplus provinces like the Punjab introduced regulations to prevent grain leaving their provinces for the famine areas of Bengal, Madras and Cochin. There was the desire to see that, first, local populations and, second, the populations of neighbouring provinces were well fed, partly to prevent civil unrest. Politicians and officials got power and patronage, and the ability to extract bribes for shipping permits. Marketing and transaction costs rose sharply. The market could not get grain to Bengal, however profitable it might be. The main trading route, established for hundreds of years was up the river system and this ceased to operate, leaving the railway as the only way of getting food into Bengal. Grain arrivals stopped and in March 1943, Calcutta, the second biggest city in the world, had only two weeks food supply in stock.

The Government of India realized a mistake had been made and decreed a return to free trade. The Provinces refused ‘In this, again, the Government of India misjudged both its own influence and the temper of its constituents, which had by this time gone too far to pay much heed to the Centre.’

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. In some cases Provinces seized grain in transit from other Provinces to Bengal.

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

Contemporary commentators believed that there was substantial hoarding by those consumers who could afford it, by firms and by those farmers who produced surpluses. This started in July 1941 when war with Japan was inevitable, increased when Burma was attacked in December 1941 and when Ceylon, then Calcutta were bombed in 1942. India would have entered the famine year with substantial surplus private stocks. These stocks do not appear to have been released and there was no political drive to get people to give or sell the surpluses. An official ‘Food Drive’ in Bengal did not result in release of hoarded stocks. It was believed that fear of the famine actually increased hoarding.

Why Bengal was refused food

The democratically elected Provincial governments, their public servants and some key people in the Indian civil service believed, or said they believed, that Bengal had plenty of food, which could be made available with good administration. There were no meaningful production statistics which could support this, and those ‘hopelessly defective’ production statistics that did exist indicated a serious shortage.

There were claims that hoarding was the cause of the famine, and this should be dealt with administratively, not by providing starving people in Bengal with food. ‘And at the Third Food Conference in Delhi on the 5th to the 8th 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 idiosyncratic 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 foodgrains 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]” For hoarding to have created the amount of hunger and death recorded if there had, indeed, been adequate supplies, it would have been necessary that the richest 10% of Bengal's population, the only ones who could afford it, to lay in two years' rice supply for themselves, in addition to the stocks accumulated in the previous two years, and to keep it in stock until the end of the war, while their neighbours starved. There was never any suggestion that anything of the sort happened, which is strong evidence against the hoarding explanation.

There was a widespread claim, unevidenced, that there was no shortage really, that there was plenty of rice available but traders were stockpiling it 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.. Such claims of speculation causing famine have been ridiculed by economists since Adam Smith.

Similarly, it was claimed, without evidence or calculation, that the 1% to 2% of the Bengal population whose purchasing power increased because of the wartime inflation and war expenditure ate so much more than usual that two thirds of the population went hungry – 10 % very hungry indeed, with half of this 10% dying of starvation and disease. A quick calculation would have shown that this explanation requires that on 1st November 1942 the small group with increased purchasing power started eating 12 to 46 times more than usual per head and that they reverted to normal consumption in December 1943.

Most contemporary sources refer to massive corruption by public servants, politicians and trading companies.

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

It was believed that some British-born Indian Civil Service officers, as well as some British politicians and civil servants, were disposed to accept uncritically any story which would show that a democratically elected Indian government could, by incompetence and corruption, create a famine where there was plenty.

Supplies from other countries

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 shipping could not be spared for India.

By August 1943 it was clear that the Allies had won the battle and there was plenty of shipping available. Mukkerjee (2011) analyses why Churchill still failed to send food to India. In response to an urgent request by the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, and Viceroy of India Archibald Wavell, to release food stocks for India, Winston Churchill the Prime Minister of that time responded with a telegram to Wavell asking, if food was so scarce, "why Gandhi hadn’t died yet." Initially during the famine he was more concerned with the civilians of Greece (who were also suffering from a famine) compared with the Bengalis.

Any aid from abroad would have arrived too late to prevent most deaths: apart from the usual delays in assembling and shipping, and the long shipping route, it would have had to be delivered at west coast ports – the Allied navies did not operate west of Ceylon, and the Bay of Bengal was covered by Japanese naval and air power. The railways were overstretched, with men and equipment sent to war zones, most of the capacity devoted to supplying the Burma front, sabotage by Congress, major flood damage to the main routes etc. And they were not geared to shipping large quantities of bulk goods. Distributing the food to the famine areas was extremely difficult and time consuming, even with Army help.

Administrative and Policy Failures

The Famine Inquiry Commission (1945) documents a large number of administrative, civil policy and military policy failures. Significantly, no other famine-struck country has published such criticisms of its own government’s actions. The failure to set up a food administration in 1939 and prepare for rationing was the key failure. The failure to enforce an India-wide food policy with an equality of sacrifice was another. Without this, the administrative controls must prevent any meaningful intervention. Political and administrative failures to set up a system for seizing surplus food in surplus areas also contributed (it was acceptable in deficit areas). There were many others which added to local shortages or otherwise increased the death rate, (e.g. Boat Denial Policy, Rice Denial Policy, various purchasing policies) but were not causes of the famine.During the Famine Inquiry Commission's investigation, one official stated that 'We felt difficulty about one thing. That was lack of one co-ordinating authority at the time of famine'

In the middle of 1942, British authorities feared that the Japanese would follow up their conquest of Burma with an invasion of British India proper by way of Bengal (see British Raj). A scorched earth policy was hastily implemented in the Chittagong region, nearest the Burmese border, to prevent access to supplies by the Japanese in case of an invasion. In particular, the Army confiscated many boats (and motor vehicles, carts and even elephants), fearing that the Japanese would commandeer them to speed an advance into India. The inhabitants used the boats for fishing and to take goods to market, and the Army failed to distribute rations to replace the fish and the food lost through the stoppage of commerce. The dislocation in the area forced many of the male inhabitants into the Military Labour Corps, where at least they received rations, but the break-up of families left many children and dependents to beg or to starve.

In December 1942 there was a shortage in Calcutta itself. Therefore focused on getting supplies to Calcutta. by trying to buy surplus stocks in the region. The quantities that District Officers were able to locate and purchase were considered too small to end the famine, so the Government introduced free trade in rice in Eastern India, hoping that traders would sell their stocks to Bengal, however this measure also failed to move large stocks to Bengal. 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 . When these propaganda drive was followed by a drive to locate hoarded stocks. When these drives continually failed to locate large stocks it convinced the government that the scale of the loss in supply was larger than they initially believed.

The Indian Army and allied troops acted only after Wavell became Viceroy and got permission from the Bengal Government. They had vehicles, including DUKW amphibious vehicles, fuel, men and administrators, which the civil authority did not, so were much more effective than the civil authority in getting food to the starving outside Calcutta. The distribution was difficult and continued for five months after the November/December 1943 crop was harvested. They did not have much food to distribute though.

During the course of the famine, 264 thousand tons of rice, 258 thousand tons of wheat and wheat products and 55 thousand tons of millets were sent to Bengal for the purposes of famine relief from the rest of India and overseas. One ton feeds 5.75 people for a year at normal consumption, perhaps 8.2 at emergency survival rates.

Food Prices

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 miniscule in relation to the shortage.. There was the normal seasonal speculation which puts up prices, forcing the population to reduce consumption and so spread what is available throughout the year (as economists from Adam Smith have pointed out). The high prices determine who is to die, the poor, rather than increase the number of deaths.

The Bengal Famine may be placed in the context of previous famines in Mughal and British India. Deccan Famine of 1630-32 killed 2,000,000 (there was a corresponding famine in northwestern China, eventually causing the Ming dynasty to collapse in 1644). During the British rule in India there were approximately 25 major famines spread through states such as Tamil Nadu in South India, Bihar in the north, and Bengal in the east; altogether, between 30 and 40 million Indians were the victims of famines in the latter half of the 19th century (Bhatia 1985).

See also

• Famine in India
• List of famines
• 2008 global rice shortage
• "BBC/OU: The things we forgot to remember - The Bengal famine". http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/bengalfamine_programme.html. 

References

• Keay, John (2001), India: a history, Grove Press, ISBN 9780802137975, http://books.google.com/?id=Tarbo7OzEO8C&vq=famine&dq=India:+A+Concise+History+inauthor:keay 
• Nelson, Dean (2010-09-09), Winston Churchill blamed for 1m deaths in India famine, London: Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/7991820/Winston-Churchill-blamed-for-1m-deaths-in-India-famine.html, retrieved October 5, 2010 
• Bhatia, B.M. (1985) Famines in India: A study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India with Special Reference to Food Problem, Delhi: Konark Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
• Bowbrick, P. ‘How Sen’s theory causes famines’ [4] accessed 14 April 2011.</
• Bowbrick, P., ‘A refutation of Sen’s theory of famine’, Food Policy. 11(2) 105-124. 1986 [5] accessed 1 Sept 2011
• Bowbrick, P., ‘Rejoinder: an untenable hypothesis on the causes of famine’, Food Policy. 12(1) 5-9, February. 1987. [6] accessed 1 Sept 2011
• Bowbrick, P., ‘Statistics you can use to check Amartya Sen’s calculations in “Poverty and Famines”’, [7] accessed 1 Sept 2011
• Goswami, O., ‘The Bengal Famine of 1943: Re-examining the Data' in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol 27, No. 4, 1990.
• Dyson and Maharatna. Dyson, T. and A. Maharatna 'Excess mortality during the Great Bengal Famine: A Re-evaluation' in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol 28, No. 3, 1991.
• Dyson, T. 'On the Demography of South Asian Famines, Part II' in Population Studies, Vol 45, No. 2, July 1991.
• Padmanabhan, S.Y. The Great Bengal Famine. Annual Review of Phytopathology, 11:11-24, 1973
• Sen, A. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, 1981, Oxford University Press. ISBN# 0198284632
• Tauger, M. 2003. Entitlement, Shortage and the 1943 Bengal Famine: Another Look. The Journal of Peasant Studies 31:45 - 72
• Iqbal, F; You, J.I. (2001). "Ideas of Justice". Democracy, Market Economics, and Development: an Asian Perspective. Other World Bank Bks. Washington, D.C: World Bank. pp. 9–24. ISBN 9780821348628. LCCN 01017950. http://books.google.com/books?id=8xETSA_BYXIC. 
• Bayly, Christopher; Harper, Tim (2004). Forgotten Armies: Britain's Asian Empire & the War with Japan. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-140-29331-0. 
• Ó Gráda, Cormac (March 2007), "Making Famine History", Journal of Economic Literature Vol. XLV: 5–38 
• Tharoor, Shashi (29 November 2010), "The Ugly Briton", Time, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992,00.html, retrieved 19 December 2010 
• Brennan, Lance. "Government Famine Relief in Bengal, 1943," The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 47, No. 3 (Aug., 1988), pp. 541–566
• Tauger, Mark. "The Indian Famine Crisis of World War II," British Scholar, Vol. I, Issue 2 (March 2009),
• Tauger, Mark, “Entitlement, Shortage, and The 1943 Bengal Famine,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 2006

Primary sources

• Aykroyd, W.R. The conquest of famine, London, Chatto and Windus, 1974.
• Bedi, Freda, Bengal Lamenting, Lion, Lahore, 1944?.
• Bengal Administration, Bengal Famine Code, (Revised edition of December 1895) Calcutta. 1897.
• Bengal Famine Inquiry Commission. Famine inquiry commission report on Bengal (1945) online edition
• Bhatia, B.M. Famines in India, Asia Publishing House, Bombay 1967.
• Braund, H.B.L., Famine in Bengal, Typescript 1944. British Library Doc D792
• Department of Anthropology, Calcutta University, quoted by Rajan, N.S.R. “‘Famine in Retrospect’”, Pamda Publications Bombay, India, 1944
• Desai, R.C., Standard of living in India and Pakistan, 1931-2 to 1940-41, Popular Book Depot, Bombay, 1953.
• Dutt, T.K., Hungry Bengal, Indian Printing Works, Lahore, 1944.
• Famine Inquiry Commission Final Report, Madras, Government of India. 1945b
• Famine Inquiry Commission, Report on Bengal, New Delhi, Government of India, 1945a, accessed at [8] April 20 2011
• Famine Inquiry Commission. Evidence to the Commission
• Frere, Sir Bartle On the Impending Bengal Famine: How it will be met and how to prevent future famines in India, London, John Murray, 1874
• Ghosh, K.C. Famines in Bengal, 1170-1943 Calcutta: Indian Associated Publishing, 1944.
• Ghosh, T.K.O., The Bengal Tragedy, Hero Publications, Lahore. 1944.
• Government of India, Report on the marketing of rice in India and Burma, Government of India Press, Calcutta. 1942.
• Hunter, W.W. Famine Aspects of Bengal, Simla 1873.
• India, Famine Inquiry Commission. Famine Inquiry Commission final report (1945) online edition
• Knight, Henry, Food Administration in India, 1939-47 (Palo Alto, 1954).
• Mahalanobis, P.C. “Recent experiments in statistical sampling in the Indian Statistical Institute.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Part iv, pp326-378. 1946
• Mahalanobis, P.C., Mukkerjee, R.K., and Ghosh, A. “A sample survey of after effects of Bengal famine of 1943.” Sankhya 7(4),337-400. 1946
• Mansergh, N. (ed) The transfer of power 1942-7 vol III, London, HMSO. 1971
• Mansergh, N. (ed) The transfer of power 1942-7 vol III, London, HMSO. 1971.
• Mansergh, N. (ed) The transfer of power 1942-7 vol IV, London, HMSO. 1973
• Mansergh, N. (ed) The transfer of power 1942-7 vol IV, London, HMSO. 1973.
• Masefield, G.B., Famine: its prevention and relief, Oxford, OUP. 1963.
• Moon, P. (ed.), Wavell: the Viceroy’s journal, OUP, Oxford 1973.
• Padmanabhan, S. Y. “The Great Bengal Famine”, Annual Review of Phytopathology 11(1973), pp. 11-26.
• Palekar, S.A., Real wages in India 1939-1950 International Book House, Bombay. 1962.
• Pinnell, L.G., The Pinnell Archive on the Bengal Famine: Evidence to the Famine Inquiry Commission 1944. British Library doc EUR Doc 911.
• Rajan, N.S.R., Famine in retrospect, Pamda Publications, Bombay. 1944.
• Stevens, I. Monsoon morning, London, Ernest Benn. 1966.

External links

• Kenneth Arrow. "Why People Go Hungry". Archived from the original on 2 May 2006. http://web.archive.org/web/20060502093320/http://www.finance.commerce.ubc.ca/~bhatta/BookReview/arrow_on_sen's_poverty_and_famine.html.  Arrow's review of Sen's book.