page_title: Indian famine of 1899–1900
section_title: Usury
hierarchical_section_title: Indian famine of 1899–1900 / Usury
caption_attribution_description: English: Bombay Presidency and Karachi, southern portion, 1909
context_page_description: The Indian famine of 1899–1900 began with the failure of the summer monsoons in 1899 over Western and Central India and, during the next year, affected an area of 476,000 square miles and a population of 59.5 million. The famine was acute in the Central Provinces and Berar, the Bombay Presidency, the minor province of Ajmer-Merwara, and the Hissar District of the Punjab; it also caused great distress in the princely states of the Rajputana Agency, the Central India Agency, Hyderabad and the Kathiawar Agency. In addition, small areas of the Bengal Presidency, the Madras Presidency and the North-Western Provinces were acutely afflicted by the famine.
  The population in many areas had barely recovered from the famine of 1896–1897. As in that famine, this one too was preceded by a drought. The Meteorological Office of India in its report of 1900, stated, "The mean average rainfall of India is 45 inches. In no previous famine year has it been in greater defect than 5 inches. But in 1899 the defect exceeded 11 inches." There were also large crop failures in the rest of India and, as a result, inter-regional trade could not be relied upon to stabilise food prices.
context_section_description: The British had established control over Western India in the early decades of the 19th century; this consisted of direct administration of the conquered territories in the expanded Bombay Presidency as well as in the British outpost of Ajmer-Merwara farther north.  The middle decades of the 19th century saw not only the implementation of a new system of land revenue and land rights in these areas, but also the establishment of new civil law.  Under the new land rights system, peasants could be dispossessed of their land if they failed to pay the land-revenue (or land-tax) in a timely fashion.  The British, however, continued to rely on local Baniya usurers, or Sahukars, to supply credit to the peasants.  The imposition of the new system of civil law, however, meant that the peasants could be exploited by the sahukars, who were often able, through the new civil courts, to acquire title-deeds to a peasant's land for non-payment of debt.
  The mid-19th century was also a time of predominance of the economic theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and the principle of laissez-faire was subscribed to by many colonial administrators; the British, consequently, declined to interfere in the markets. This meant that the Baniya sahukars could resort to hoarding during times of scarcity, driving up the price of food grain, and profiteering in the aftermath. All this occurred in Western India during the famine of 1899–1900.
  In Kaira District in present-day Gujarat, many peasants were forced to hand over their lands to the sahukars as security for meager loans that not only didn't grant them much relief, but that they later couldn't repay on account of exorbitant interest.  The sahukars were to foreclose on these loans in the years after the famine; in the princely state of Baroda, for example, the recorded land-transfers were to jump from an average of 13,000 per year during the decade of the 1890s, to over 65,000 during the year  1902–1903.
  The sahukars, in their effort to drive up prices, were even able to export grain out of areas of scarcity using the faster means of transport that came in with British rule. Here again the colonial administrators declined to intervene, even though they themselves often disapproved of the practice. This happened, for example, in the Panchmahals—one of the worst famine-afflicted areas in 1900—where a railway line had been built in the 1890s. A British deputy district collector recorded in his report, "The merchants first cleared large profits by exporting their surplus stocks of grain at the commencement of the famine, and, later on by importing maize from Cawnpore and Bombay and rice from Calcutta and Rangoon."  He went on to record that the sahukars were building new houses for themselves from these windfall profits. The blatant profiteering, however, led to grain riots in the Panchmahals by Bhil tribals, and grain riots became a feature of other British-ruled areas during times of famine. This contrasted markedly with the princely states, where the authorities often did intervene. For example, in Jodhpur State, a famine-stricken area in Rajputana, in August 1899, the state officials set up a shop to sell grain at cost price, forcing the Baniya merchants to eventually bring down their prices.
caption: A map of the northern Bombay Presidency showing the districts of Khaira, Panchmahals, and the princely state of Baroda (bottom right).  The princely state of Jodhpur is shown at the top right.
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