INDIA, June 11, 2016 (BBC by Dinyar Patel): Drought and a searing heat wave have affected an astonishing 330 million people across the country. But this summer also marks the 150th anniversary of a far more terrible and catastrophic climatic event: the Orissa famine of 1866. Hardly anyone today knows about this famine. Yet the Orissa famine killed over a million people in eastern India. In modern-day Orissa state, the worst hit region, one out of every three people perished, a mortality rate far more staggering than that caused by the Irish Potato Famine.
Famine, while no stranger to the subcontinent, increased in frequency and deadliness with the advent of British colonial rule. The East India Company helped kill off India’s once-robust textile industries, pushing more and more people into agriculture. This, in turn, made the Indian economy much more dependent on the whims of seasonal monsoons. “It can, we fear, no longer be concealed that we are on the eve of a period of general scarcity,” announced the Englishman, a Calcutta newspaper, in late 1865. The Indian and British press carried reports of rising prices, dwindling grain reserves, and the desperation of peasants no longer able to afford rice.
For years, a rising generation of Western-educated Indians had alleged that British rule was grossly impoverishing India. The Orissa famine served as eye-popping proof of this thesis. It prompted one early nationalist, Dadabhai Naoroji, to begin his lifelong investigations into Indian poverty. As the famine abated in early 1867, Mr Naoroji sketched out the earliest version of his “drain theory”–the idea that Britain was enriching itself by literally sucking the lifeblood out of India. His point was simple. India had enough food supplies to feed the starving – why had the government instead let them die? While Orissans perished in droves in 1866, Mr Naoroji noted that India had actually exported over 200 million pounds of rice to Britain. He discovered a similar pattern of mass exportation during other famine years. “Good God,” Mr Naoroji declared, “when will this end?”
More of this account at “source” above.