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    Famines of Bengal 1770,1943

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    Austin Gomes
    The document summarizes the causes of two major famines in Bengal - in 1770 and 1943. For the 1770 famine, the key causes included failure of monsoon and crops due to weather, as well as the East India Company's lack of relief policies and hoarding of grain. Around one third of the population perished. For the 1943 famine, factors included disruption of food distribution and transport due to World War 2, as well as rising food prices and wages not keeping pace, leading to the deaths of 3 million people despite there being adequate overall food supply. Economist Amartya Sen's work highlighted how lack of access to food rather than lack of supply itself can cause famines.

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    Famines of Bengal 1770,1943

    Uploaded by

    Austin Gomes
    102 views12 pages
    The document summarizes the causes of two major famines in Bengal - in 1770 and 1943. For the 1770 famine, the key causes included failure of monsoon and crops due to weather, as well as the East India Company's lack of relief policies and hoarding of grain. Around one third of the population perished. For the 1943 famine, factors included disruption of food distribution and transport due to World War 2, as well as rising food prices and wages not keeping pace, leading to the deaths of 3 million people despite there being adequate overall food supply. Economist Amartya Sen's work highlighted how lack of access to food rather than lack of supply itself can cause famines.

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    FAMINES OF BENGAL 1770,1943

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    The document summarizes the causes of two major famines in Bengal - in 1770 and 1943. For the 1770 famine, the key causes included failure of monsoon and crops due to weather, as well as the East India Company's lack of relief policies and hoarding of grain. Around one third of the population perished. For the 1943 famine, factors included disruption of food distribution and transport due to World War 2, as well as rising food prices and wages not keeping pace, leading to the deaths of 3 million people despite there being adequate overall food supply. Economist Amartya Sen's work highlighted how lack of access to food rather than lack of supply itself can cause famines.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    102 views12 pages

    Famines of Bengal 1770,1943

    Uploaded by

    Austin Gomes
    The document summarizes the causes of two major famines in Bengal - in 1770 and 1943. For the 1770 famine, the key causes included failure of monsoon and crops due to weather, as well as the East India Company's lack of relief policies and hoarding of grain. Around one third of the population perished. For the 1943 famine, factors included disruption of food distribution and transport due to World War 2, as well as rising food prices and wages not keeping pace, leading to the deaths of 3 million people despite there being adequate overall food supply. Economist Amartya Sen's work highlighted how lack of access to food rather than lack of supply itself can cause famines.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    of 12

    FAMINES OF BENGAL 1770,1943

    Two Great Disasters –


    During British Rule
    The Famines of 1770 and 1943
    General Causes of Famine
    AMARTYA SEN ( 1933 -
    Causes of famine
    • In 1981, Sen published Poverty and Famines: An
    Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), a
    book in which he argued that famine occurs not
    only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built
    into mechanisms for distributing food. Sen also
    argued that the Bengal famine of 1943 was caused
    by an urban economic boom that raised food
    prices, thereby causing millions of rural workers to
    starve to death when their wages did not keep up.
    [14]
    CAUSES OF FAMINE
    • Sen's interest in famine stemmed from personal experience.
    As a nine-year-old boy, he witnessed the 
    Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million people
    perished. This staggering loss of life was unnecessary, Sen
    later concluded. He presents data that there was an
    adequate food supply in Bengal at the time, but particular
    groups of people including rural landless laborers and urban
    service providers like haircutters did not have the means to
    buy food as its price rose rapidly due to factors that include
    British military acquisition, panic buying, hoarding, and 
    price gouging, all connected to the war in the region
    CAUSES OF FAMINE
    • In Poverty and Famines, Sen revealed that in
    many cases of famine, food supplies were not
    significantly reduced. In Bengal, for example,
    food production, while down on the previous
    year, was higher than in previous non-famine
    years. Sen points to a number of social and
    economic factors, such as declining wages,
    unemployment, rising food prices, and poor
    food-distribution, which led to starvation.
    CAUSES OF FAMINE
    • His capabilities approach focuses on 
    positive freedom, a person's actual ability to be or
    do something, rather than on negative freedom
     approaches, which are common in economics and
    simply focuses on non-interference. In the Bengal
    famine, rural laborers' negative freedom to buy food
    was not affected. However, they still starved
    because they were not positively free to do
    anything, they did not have the functioning of
    nourishment, nor the capability to escape morbidity
    FAMINE OF 1770
    • Revenue policy of the East India Company
    • Failure of Monsoon
    • Failure of Crops
    • People felt the pinch of the calamity
    • Starving Population
    • People moved to towns and cities
    • Calamitous scenes of Murshidabad
    • Living people devouring the dead
    FAMINE OF 1770
    Policy of the East India Company
    • Did not have any policy
    • Hoarding of Grain
    • Government did not take any relief measures
    • One third of the people perished
    • Post –Famine policy of the Company
    • Long lasting impact of Famine
    FAMINE OF 1943
    • World War Two
    • Advance of Japan
    • British Defeat
    • Japanese advancing toward Bengal
    • Destruction of Boats -60000
    • People had to vacate cultivable land of air
    ports and aero drum
    Effect of the Policy
    • Saving Kolkata
    • Forced buying of grain
    • People left no money to purchase food grains
    • People in Kolkata
    • People of East Bengal
    • 3.5 million people died
    Devastating results of Famine
    • Great shocks for the people of East Bengal

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