Great Famine of 1876–1878

The Great Famine of 1876–1878 was a famine in India under Crown rule. It began in 1876 after an intense drought resulted in crop failure in the Deccan Plateau. It affected south and Southwestern India—the British-administered presidencies of Madras and Bombay, and the princely states of Mysore and Hyderabad—for a period of two years. In 1877, famine came to affect regions northward, including parts of the Central Provinces and the North-Western Provinces, and a small area in Punjab. The famine ultimately affected an area of 670,000 square kilometres (257,000 sq mi) and caused distress to a population totalling 58,500,000. The excess mortality in the famine has been estimated in a range whose low end is 5.6 million human fatalities, high end 9.6 million fatalities, and a careful modern demographic estimate 8.2 million fatalities. The famine is also known as the Southern India famine of 1876–1878 and the Madras famine of 1877.

Quotes

Matthew White - Atrocitology, 2011

White, Matthew - Atrocitology _ humanity's 100 deadliest achievements-Canongate Books (2011)

• Let’s jump ahead a hundred years to a time when the whole of India had been brought under British control, and the East India Company’s authority had been transferred to the Crown. In 1874, a drought in the northeastern Indian provinces of Bengal and Bihar ruined the harvest. Starvation loomed for millions of unlucky peasants, but the local official, Sir Richard Temple, leapt into action and set up a model welfare system to ease hunger. Importing a half-million tons of rice from Burma, he distributed it freely to the poor. Thanks to Temple’s prompt action, only twenty-three people starved to death in that famine. It has been called “the only truly successful British relief effort in the nineteenth century.” Temple was severely reprimanded for his extravagance in feeding the hungry natives in his charge. The Economist scolded him for teaching the Indians that “it is the duty of the government to keep them alive.” He was scorned all across the governing class for spending public money and meddling in the natural order of things. Humbled by the criticism, Temple learned his lesson and wanted to make amends. The opportunity came quickly, in 1876, when the monsoon rains failed to arrive across a much larger area. The earth dried up and died. Crops shriveled; livestock wasted away. When Temple took the job of supervising the relief effort of this new famine, he was desperate to prove that he could stay within budget. “Everything must be subordinated,” he promised, “to the financial consideration of disbursing the smallest sum of money consistent with the preservation of human life.”
• ...The guiding philosophy at the time was that relief should be difficult to obtain in order to discourage the poor from becoming dependent on government handouts.8 Recipients were expected to work hard for their supper, digging ditches and breaking stones. The camps accepted only the able-bodied and healthy into their public works projects, and they hired only workers from at least ten miles away, on the theory that a long walk would weed out the weaklings. Hundreds of thousands were turned away as too weak to be of any use. Most British authorities agreed that helping the poor only created a cycle of dependency. The finance minister declared, “Every benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine and defective sanitation serves but to enhance the evils resulting from overpopulation.” Lytton argued that the Indian population “has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil,” and that any relief would simply be absorbed in further unrestrained breeding.9 A later government report concluded, “If the government spent more of its revenue on famine relief, an even larger proportion of the population would become penurious.”
• The ration that Richard Temple distributed to each inmate of these labor camps was only two-thirds of what he had given out during his successful relief in 1874—1,627 calories per day instead of 2,500. In fact, the new daily ration for the starving Indians of 1876 had 123 fewer calories than the ration for an inmate in the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald in 1944. The Temple ration of one pound of rice a day—no meat, no vegetables—was half of what felons in Indian prisons received.10
• Temple and Lytton imposed the Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 on all of the lands under their control, which outlawed any private relief donations that might undercut the price of grain set by the open market. The law was backed up by the threat of imprisonment. Meanwhile, as the people of India starved, over 300,000 tons of grain was exported from India to Europe.11
• ...Lord Salisbury, the secretary of state for India, waffled on the proper response to the hunger. On the one hand, he tried to distance himself from countrymen who “worshipped political economy as a sort of ‘fetish’ ” and who considered “famine as a salutary cure for over-population.” On the other hand, he congratulated Disraeli for not being fooled by “the growing idea that England ought to pay tribute to India for having conquered her.”Salisbury denigrated the idea “that a rich Britain should consent to penalize her trade for the sake of a poor India” as a “species of International Communism.”
• ..An English publisher tried to get his fellow journalists to investigate what was going on in India. “For long weary years have we demanded the suspension of [the land tax] when famine comes and in vain. With no poor law in the land, and the old policy once more set up of letting people pull through or die, as they can . . . we and our contemporaries must speak without reserve or be partakers in the guilt of multitudinous murders committed by the men blinded to the real nature of what we are doing in the country.”
• An 1878 government report on the famine absolved the government of all responsibility and blamed it entirely on the weather. The official estimate was that 5.5 million died in the British territory, not counting the native states, but various scholars later estimated that either 10.3, or 8.2, or 6.1 million died across India during the 1876 famine.
  • White, Matthew - Atrocitology _ humanity's 100 deadliest achievements-Canongate Books (2011)