The Famine Codes Begun in 1883 Gave India an Early-Warning and Relief System, and No Famine on the Scale of 1943 Has Followed

The Government of India circulated its Provisional Famine Code with a resolution dated 9 June 1883. It told village officers what to report when crops looked poor (the state of the harvest, the grain stocks, the fodder), when to open relief works, and how to fix the wage. The code came out of the Famine Commission of 1880, which estimated that the drought and famine of 1877 and 1878 had killed more than 5 million people above the normal death rate in British-ruled provinces. The Agriculture Ministry’s Manual for Drought Management of December 2016 is the central government’s current guide to the same job. It names a Central Drought Relief Commissioner, describes a Crop Weather Watch Group that should meet at least once a week from June to September, and records that the country “did not witness a famine in the past 69 years”.

What the 1880 commission told officers to watch

General Richard Strachey chaired the commission, appointed on 16 May 1878. Two of its members, C. Rangacharlu, controller of the Maharaja of Mysore’s household, and Mahadeo Wasudeo Barve, karbari (administrator) of Kolhapur state, left in October 1879 because they could not travel to England with the rest.

The report asked the Government of India to issue binding principles and each local government to draft a code with detailed instructions, and it attached a model code. It asked for a special officer in every district to compile harvest returns, market prices, food stocks and wages, and to work out which classes would be first to suffer when grain turned dear. Above him would sit a Director of Agriculture in each province, who in a bad year was to warn the government about the agricultural outlook. For relief it chose a work test: labour suited to each person’s strength, paid at a wage enough to maintain a worker and no more.

Two of the five commissioners who signed the report, James Caird and H. E. Sullivan, added a note of dissent. They proposed storing grain in pits in remote villages for the poorest families.

Bihar, 1873 to 1874: no deaths from famine and a bill of 6.5 million pounds

When the rains stopped early over northern Bengal in 1873, the Government of India under the Viceroy, Lord Northbrook, concluded that private trade could not feed the area. With the Secretary of State’s approval it imported 480,000 tons of rice, mostly bought in Burma and sent up-country by rail to depots. About three quarters of a million people worked on relief works for nine months, 450,000 received free relief every day for six months, and 3.2 million bought grain cheaply or took advances. The 1880 commission wrote that inquiries indicated no mortality at all was due to the famine.

The same report gave the cost as about 6.5 million pounds, as much as all earlier famine relief since 1800 together, and said more than 100,000 tons of surplus grain had to be sold at a great loss. It put the verdict in one line: life was preserved, “but money was spent profusely”. Caird and Sullivan wrote that Bihar in 1874 was the only famine in which saving life had been achieved, “though at an excessive cost”. William Digby, honorary secretary of the Indian Famine Relief Fund, recorded in 1878 that Sir Richard Temple “was charged with extravagant expenditure in Behar”. Temple became Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal in April 1874, according to Banglapedia, and the commission says he was sent south in 1877 because of his Bihar experience. The commission also noted a unanimous opinion that railway extension meant state grain buying would not be needed again in northern Bengal.

1877 and 1878: the reaction to the bill

The commission described what followed. An impression had spread that Bihar meant lavish spending, and it concluded the Government of India’s advisers were influenced by it. When the monsoon failed in the south in 1876, grain buying that Madras had begun was stopped. Temple went south in January 1877 as the government’s famine delegate, and the ration he set is covered in our account of Lord Lytton, the Durbar and the famine.

The Commission examined that ration. A note by its secretary, reprinted in the 1883 code, records that a rate as low as Bombay’s “could not safely be prescribed for general use”. Money was the other casualty. In 1878 the government had undertaken to set aside 1.5 million pounds a year for famine insurance, and the Afghan war took the surpluses. The Marquess of Hartington told the Commons on 22 August 1881 that the insurance balances, 4,035,309 pounds, had been appropriated to the war, and that the year’s budget would include 1.5 million again.

1896 to 1901: the code on trial

The famine of 1896 and 1897 affected about 225,000 square miles and 62 million people, and the state spent 727 lakh rupees (7.27 crore) on direct relief. A Government of India resolution of 23 December 1897 said of the relief organisation that “on the whole it has stood the trial well”, and the Commission of 1898 under Sir J. B. Lyall went through the results province by province. In the four northern districts of Bihar it found relief had been “entirely successful in both respects”, the relief of distress and the saving of life, with no excess mortality it could trace to famine.

In the Jabalpur division of the Central Provinces it found the opposite. The commission wrote that the high local authorities had failed to grasp the situation in late 1895 and early 1896, and that starting the full machinery at the beginning of 1896 would have saved a considerable number of lives.

The commission of 1901 reported on the famine of 1899 and 1900, which covered about 189,000 square miles and 28 million people. In Raipur district 44.61 per cent of the population were on relief at the end of July 1900, and in Betul more than 40 per cent for two months. The commissioners wrote of “the importance of the personal equation in famine administration”. The Central Provinces death rate for the famine year, November 1899 to October 1900, was 54.37 per thousand against a ten-year average of 34.50. The commission said it was “not prepared to adopt a fatalistic view of famine mortality”, pointed to a harsh winter, polluted water and a malaria epidemic, and noted that no provincial government had appointed a Famine Commissioner in 1900.

The 1901 report also listed the warning signs for officers: wandering paupers as private charity shrinks, tightening credit, feverish activity in the grain trade, more crime, herds moving in search of fodder, and unusual wandering by people.

1943: a code written for droughts

The Famine Inquiry Commission of 1944 and 1945, chaired by Sir John Woodhead, started from the code’s design. It said the codes were built for drought famines, where crops fail, government gives people money (as loans, free relief or wages on works) and grain flows in through ordinary trade. In the small famines of the previous 40 years, it wrote, the code “has on the whole proved satisfactory” and catastrophic mortality was avoided.

Bengal in 1943 was different. Grain prices rose to five or six times the normal level, and the code, the commission said, “assumes free trade in foodgrains”, which no longer existed. The Bengal Government did not declare a famine. The commission called the propaganda policy of April and May 1943, meant to calm fears, misguided, and thought a declaration would have brought a Famine Commissioner with full powers over relief.

It estimated about 1 million deaths above the average in 1943 and about 1.5 million counting 1944 and the epidemics, and rejected a Calcutta University estimate of 3.5 million as statistically unsound. Drèze and Sen, as quoted by Plümper and Neumayer, give about 3 million. Our article on the Bengal famine of 1943 sets out the later estimates.

The commission’s Final Report said the State should recognise its ultimate responsibility to provide enough food for all, and that a central reserve of 500,000 tons of foodgrains was essential. A Ministry of Food report of April 1948 records the policy that the Centre would keep not less than 5 lakh tons, and if possible up to 10 lakh tons, of its 1948 imports as an emergency reserve.

Sen’s argument, and what Bihar adds

Amartya Sen, whose 1981 book on famine the 1998 Nobel press release called his best-known work in the area, wrote in the Journal of Democracy in 1999 that “no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press”. India’s famines, he added, “disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press”. His reasoning was that a government facing elections and opposition newspapers has to act, and that deaths can be prevented by restoring incomes through employment programmes. The site’s article on the rural job guarantee law of 2005 has the person-day figures.

The case that complicates the claim is Bihar in 1966 and 1967. Plümper and Neumayer, summarising Drèze’s 1990 study, note registered excess deaths of 1 and 3.5 per thousand in those two years, which they work out as 50,000 to 175,000 deaths. Drèze found “precious little evidence” for the self-congratulatory claims made about the relief. Dyson and Maharatna, in the same summary, say the data neither confirm nor rule out substantial mortality. The same paper, citing Brass (1986), says the state government declined to declare a famine before the November 1967 election and that about 2.5 million tons of grain reached Bihar, half of what the state asked for, mostly as United States food aid. Plümper and Neumayer conclude that democracies can see famine deaths but are likely to see fewer than autocracies, and their cross-country analysis for 1972 to 2000 supports that.

The government’s own manual gives a different emphasis. It credits investment in irrigation, quality inputs, research and extension for making India self-sufficient in food and, “to a considerable extent, famine proof”. Our piece on Swaminathan and the Green Revolution has the wheat figures. The 1880 commission had already written that railways saved India from worse disasters in the famines of its day. None of these sources measures how much of the change each cause explains.

Where the codes stand now

Section 3 of the National Food Security Act of 2013 entitles every person in a priority household to five kilograms of foodgrains a month and every Antyodaya household to 35 kilograms, up to 75 per cent of the rural and 50 per cent of the urban population. The counts and the free-grain scheme are in our article on the National Food Security Act and the Public Distribution System.

The codes themselves have changed names. A Minister of State for Agriculture told the Lok Sabha on 25 July 2005 that Famine Codes are drawn up and implemented by the state governments. The written answer continued: “With famines (serious shortages of food) ceasing to occur, there are Scarcity or Relief Manuals which the State Governments update from time to time.” The Centre, it added, revises the norms of expenditure for assistance from the Calamity Relief Fund and the National Calamity Contingency Fund.