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There were 14 famines in India between 11th and 17th century (Bhatia, 1985). B.M. Bhatia believes that the earlier famines were localised and it was only after 1860, during the British rule, that famine came to signify general shortage of foodgrains in the country. In the latter half of the 19th century, there were approximately 25 major famines across India which killed between 30 and 40 million people. The famines were the result of the almost total collapse of India's native industries, as its skilled artisans were driven out of work while British imports flooded into the Indian markets. The famines were a product both of uneven rainfall and British economic and administrative policies, which since 1857 had led to the seizure and conversion of local farmland to foreign-owned plantations, restrictions on internal trade, heavy taxation of Indians to support unsuccessful British expeditions in Afghanistan like the Second Anglo-Afghan War, inflationary measures that increased the price of food, and substantial exports of staple crops from India to Britain. (Dutt, 1900 and 1902; Srivastava, 1968; Sen, 1982; Bhatia, 1985.) Some British citizens such as William Digby agitated for policy reforms and famine relief, but Lord Lytton, the governing British viceroy in India, opposed such changes in the belief that they would stimulate shirking by Indian workers. The first Bengal famine of 1770 is estimated to have taken nearly one-third of the population. The famines continued until Independence in 1948, with the Bengal famine of 1943-44 being among the most devastating, killing 3-4 million during World War II. The Famine Commission of 1880 observed that each province in British India, including Burma, had a surplus of foodgrains, and the annual surplus was 5.16 million tons (Bhatia, 1970). At that time, annual export of rice and other grains from India was approximately one million tons. In 1966, there was a 'near miss' in Bihar, when the USA allocated 900,000 tons of grain to fight the famine. It is the closest independent India came to a famine. The increase in food to the population is also reflected in the fact that in the 50 years of British rule (1891 to 1941) the population grew by 35% (from 287 million to 389 million) whereas in the 50 years of democratic rule from 1951 to 2001 the population grew by 183% (from 363 million to 1,023 million) 2. The fact that there have been no famines even with a population that has almost tripled makes it an even more impressive achievement for the democratic government.
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