Explain the factors responsible for the recurrent of famines in the nineteenth century. What remedial measures were adopted by the British?

Answer:

Nineteenth-century India suffered famines of unprecedented severity, killing tens of millions. Drought was the trigger, but the deeper causes lay in colonial revenue policy, commercialisation of agriculture, the destruction of traditional relief and a doctrinaire faith in free markets.

Economic causes

• Heavy and inflexible land revenue left the peasant no reserve against a bad season.
• Commercialisation replaced food grains with cotton, indigo and opium for export.
• Grain continued to be exported even during scarcity.
• Deindustrialisation threw artisans back on an already overburdened agriculture.
• Rural indebtedness deprived cultivators of their stocks and their land.

Administrative and ideological causes

• Laissez-faire doctrine forbade interference with the grain trade.
• The Malthusian view held famine to be a natural check on population.
• Traditional relief through village stores, charity and state remission had decayed.
• Railways, ironically, enabled traders to move grain away from deficit regions to better markets.

The scale of the disasters

• The Bengal famine of 1770 killed perhaps a third of the province's population.
• The Orissa famine of 1866 caused about a million deaths.
• The great famine of 1876-78 in the south and Deccan killed some five million.
• The famine of 1896-97 and that of 1899-1900 affected vast areas of the country.

Remedial measures adopted

• The Campbell Commission of 1866 followed the Orissa disaster.
• The Strachey Commission of 1880 produced the first Famine Code.
• Codes classified distress and prescribed relief works paid in wages.
• The Lyall Commission of 1897 and the MacDonnell Commission of 1901 refined the system.
• Irrigation works and agricultural banks were promoted, and the Famine Insurance Grant created.

Assessment of the measures

• Relief was tied to labour on works at wages often below subsistence.
• The codes reduced mortality in later famines but never addressed the underlying causes.
• Romesh Dutt and Naoroji linked famine directly to the drain and to over-assessment.
• Amartya Sen later argued that famine arises from failures of entitlement, not of food supply alone.

Nationalist response

• The famines became a central charge in the nationalist indictment of British rule.
• Naoroji contrasted Indian famine mortality with British prosperity.
• William Digby and other British critics publicised the death tolls.
• Relief works and famine policy became recurring subjects of Congress resolutions.

Nineteenth-century famines were therefore man-made in their severity, arising from a colonial economy that stripped the peasant of reserves and a doctrine that forbade timely intervention. As Sen's analysis suggests, the Famine Codes mitigated symptoms while the structural causes, poverty and lack of entitlement, remained untouched until independence.