page_title: Bengal famine of 1943
section_title: 1942–45: Military build-up, inflation, and displacement
hierarchical_section_title: Bengal famine of 1943 / Pre-famine shocks and distress / 1942–45: Military build-up, inflation, and displacement
caption_attribution_description: English: US soldiers remove their shoes before entering the Calcutta Jain Temple, Calcutta, India, 1943
context_page_description: The Bengal famine of 1943 was a famine in the Bengal province of British India during World War II. An estimated 2.1–3 million, out of a population of 60.3 million, died of starvation, malaria, or other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary conditions and lack of health care. Millions were impoverished as the crisis overwhelmed large segments of the economy and catastrophically disrupted the social fabric. Eventually, families disintegrated; men sold their small farms and left home to look for work or to join the British Indian Army, and women and children became homeless migrants, often travelling to Calcutta or other large cities in search of organised relief. Historians usually characterise the famine as anthropogenic, asserting that wartime colonial policies created and then exacerbated the crisis. A minority view exists, however, that holds that the famine was the result of natural causes.
  Bengal's economy had been predominantly agrarian, with between half and three-quarters of the rural poor subsisting in a "semi-starved condition".
context_section_description: The fall of Burma brought Bengal close to the war front; its impact fell more strongly on Bengal than elsewhere in India. Major urban areas, especially Calcutta, drew increasing numbers of workers into military industries and troops from many nations. Unskilled labourers from Bengal and nearby provinces were employed by military contractors, particularly for the construction of American and British airfields. Hundreds of thousands of American, British, Indian, and Chinese troops arrived in the province, straining domestic supplies and leading to scarcities across wide ranges of daily necessities. The general inflationary pressures of a war-time economy caused prices to rise rapidly across the entire spectrum of goods and services. The rise in prices was "not disturbing" until 1941, when it became more alarming. Then in early 1943, the rate of inflation for foodgrains in particular took an unprecedented upward turn.
  Nearly the full output of India's cloth, wool, leather and silk industries were sold to the military. In the system that the British Government used to procure goods through the Government of India, industries were left in private ownership rather than facing outright requisitioning of their productive capacity. Firms were required to sell goods to the military on credit and at fixed, low prices. However, firms were left free to charge any price they desired in their domestic market for whatever they had left over. In the case of the textiles industries that supplied cloth for the uniforms of the British military, for example, they charged a very high price in domestic markets. By the end of 1942, cloth prices had more than tripled from their pre-war levels; they had more than quadrupled by mid-1943. Much of the goods left over for civilian use were purchased by speculators. As a result, "civilian consumption of cotton goods fell by more than 23% from the peace time level by 1943/44". The hardships that were felt by the rural population through a severe "cloth famine" were alleviated when military forces began distributing relief supplies between October 1942 and April 1943.
  The method of credit financing was tailored to UK wartime needs. Britain agreed to pay for defence expenditures above the amount that India had paid in peacetime (adjusted for inflation). However, their purchases were made entirely on credit accumulated in the Bank of England and not redeemable until after the war. At the same time, the Bank of India was permitted to treat those credits as assets against which it could print currency up to two and a half times more than the total debt incurred. India's money printing presses then began running overtime, printing the currency that paid for all these massive expenditures. The tremendous rise in nominal money supply coupled with a scarcity of consumption goods spurred monetary inflation, reaching its peak in 1944–45. The accompanying rise in incomes and purchasing power fell disproportionately into the hands of industries in Calcutta (in particular, munitions industries).
  Military build-up caused massive displacement of Bengalis from their homes. Farmland purchased for airstrip and camp construction is "estimated to have driven between 30,000 and 36,000 families (about 150,000 to 180,000 persons) off their land", according to the historian Paul Greenough. They were paid for the land, but they had lost their employment. The urgent need for housing for the immense influx of workers and soldiers from 1942 onward created further problems. Military barracks were scattered around Calcutta. The Famine Commission report of 1945 stated that the owners had been paid for these homes, but "there is little doubt that the members of many of these families became famine victims in 1943".
caption: American soldiers at the Calcutta Jain Temple, July 1943. Calcutta became a hub for hundreds of thousands of Allied troops.
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