Talk:Famine in India

message: The article gives undue weight to the famines in British colonial period and has very poor coverage of history before that. Please expand the pre-colonial history and compress/summarize the colonial history.--Nizil (talk) 13:53, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: The article looks fairly balanced to me. What are you talking about?-GPRamirez5 (talk) 14:58, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: , The article is divided into three main sections pre-colonial (before ~1700), British rule (1700-1947) and republic of India (1947-2017). Pre-colonial period has only few paragraphs which covers nearly 2000 years of written history, British rule is about 250 years which is excessively detailed and Republic of India (70 years) is also very detailed. So I am suggesting expansion of pre-colonial period and some compression of British period. So all three periods are comparatively well covered. It is just a note. If there is a lack of sources of pre-colonial period, it ok to leave as it is. Regards, --Nizil (talk) 16:47, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: The website referred to in the previous Talk section "Outdated Information in Lede": http://www.vinlandmap.info/india-famine/ gives an idea of the scale of famine in India from 1500 to 1767, but it is basically a compilation of primary sources, so what would be the best way to use it as a starting-point for improving the pre-British information on this page? 2.98.169.246 (talk) 08:52, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: Notes

message: This page suffers from a few problems. First it seems to insinuate that famines were more numerous/increased under colonial rule. That isn't correct. I quote from Tirthankar Roy's book:
 "We cannot be sure if famines were more frequent or less frequent during British rule compared with past rules. The required sources do not exist for periods before the early-1800s... Mixing sources can lead to misleading conclusions about the long history of famines. Historians of Indian famines have often fallen in that trap. For example, one of the best-known works on Indian famines, Famines in India by B. M. Bhatia, estimates that ‘in the earlier times a major famine occurred once every 50 years’, whereas ‘between 1860 and 1908, famine or scarcity prevailed in .. twenty out of the total of forty-nine years’. His source was Alexander Loveday, a Cambridge scholar who wrote an essay on Indian famines in 1914. Loveday did not do any original research but prepared an appendix listing known famines since the beginning of the Common Era. Whereas the post-1800 famines were recorded by the government statistical system, the pre-1800 data came from hagiographies and travelogues. The frequency with which famines occurred in these earlier times depended on the frequency with which hagiographies were written. If this was once in fifty years, we would conclude that famines happened once in fifty years, as Bhatia did. It makes no sense".Roy, Tirthankar. (2019). How British Rule Changed India’s Economy: The Paradox of the Raj.
I also quote from Abraham Eraly's The Mughal World, India: Penguin, 2007: 
"THE SINGLE MOST appalling fact of life in Mughal India was famine, a spectre present at the turn of every season".Abraham Eraly's, The Mughal World, India: Penguin, 2007
The next major problem with this page is the uncritical reliance on Mike Davis. Mike Davis's work has serious issues. For example DavisMike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001). claims that "were 31 serious famines in the 120 years of British rule compared with 17 famines in the 2,000 years before British rule". Davis quite clearly cites his source for this claim which is a preliminary study of the worldwide history of famine made by Cornelius Walford for the Statistical Society of London back in 1878. However Davis ignores Charles Blair's "Indian famines: Their historical, financial and other aspects …" which states "had noted a significant problem: "… reliable records are only available from the date of our rule in India; and it will be seen ... that subsequent to this time these disasters have been very frequent".Charles Blair, Indian Famines: Their Historical, Financial and Other Aspects, containing remarks on their management and some notes on preventive and mitigative measures (W. Blackwood, 1874).
This site: http://www.vinlandmap.info/india-famine/ has also marshalled evidence to the contrary.
That's not all. Next Davis states "Mogul [sic] India was generally free of famine until the 1770s,” while the British colonial state that succeeded it was unable to prevent or mitigate famine because of its rigid adherence to laissez faire and reluctance to intervene in grain markets. Ironically enough, the evidence Davis cites in the three page section of his work devoted to precolonial systems of famine relief in India consists largely of consists largely of unsupported assertions of the superiority of Mughal systems by conservative East India Company officials such as Sir John Malcolm and Mountstuart Elphinstone, who in the 1820s and 1830s were engaged in a polemical debate with “westernisers” in Calcutta over whether British rule should take on “European” or “Oriental” forms.Morrison, Alexander. (2019). Convicts and Concentration Camps. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 20. 390-403. 
I again quote Eraly's book "These [relief measures] were, however, only token and random measures, at best palliatives. The amounts spent on famine relief were trivial compared to the extravagant personal expenses of the emperor and the amirs, for instance, the 100,000 rupees disbursed by Shah Jahan for famine relief was a mere one tenth of the annual pin money of Mumtaz Mahal! The Mughal indifference to the woes of the people was not callousness, but culture. It was the same everywhere in the medieval world. Human misery was not seen as misery by medieval rulers, but merely as the common lot. Even if the emperor had viewed it differently, and had wished to help, there was not much that he could do, for he did not have the administrative capability for effective famine relief… For the emperor, famine relief was charity, desirable but not obligatory. His primary concern was to preserve and extend his power, and he would not even suspend military operations to provide famine relief. The attitudes of Hindu monarchs were the same. Thus, 'while people died with the word "bread" upon their lips,' Hemu, the Hindu revivalist, 'valued the lives of a hundred thousand men at no more than a barley corn,' says Badauni; 'he fed his five hundred elephants upon rice, sugar, and butter. The whole world was astounded and disgusted.'For a monarch it was more prudent to feed elephants than people”.Abraham Eraly, The Mughal World, India: Penguin, 2007
Dharma Kumar goes further and states that the colonial government’s famine relief was no worse than its predecessors.  Dharma Kumar, ‘States and Civil Societies in Modern Asia,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 28(42), 1993, 2266-2269. 
Davis then refers to the Bengali zamindars as a traditional Indian elite when of course they were a British administrative creation, noted not for their paternalism, as Davis argues, but for screwing as much revenue as they possibly could out of the land the colonial state had given them.Morrison, Alexander. (2019). Convicts and Concentration Camps. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 20. 390-403.
Davis blames the increase in cash crop production and food exports (commercialisation of agriculture) for India’s famines. Fact remains however that even when cash crop production increased in the 20th century, more than 80% of the acreage cropped was given to food crops.Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 140–41. The share of exports in total agricultural production in 1871 was only
around 10%.https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/sbroadberry/wp/indiangdppre1870v4.pdf Wheat was exported but not more than 5 % of the estimated output was exported. Exportable goods came from just a few districts and at its peak only 10–15% of crop land was devoted to non food exports.Tirthankar Roy, India in the World Economy: From Antiquity to the Present (New Approaches to Asian History). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
I hope we can discuss and hopefully incorporate some changes which will hopefully balance this page and in turn make it more sound. Xlhat97 (talk) 01:58, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: One small correction: although the "zamindari system" of landholding was a British creation, zamindars did indeed exist under the Mughal Empire as part of the nightmare tangle of officials in Bengal "inherited" by the Company in 1764, as witnessed by young British bureaucrat John Grose during the 1770 faminehttp://www.vinlandmap.info/india-famine/1770-rangpore.htm:"Am I quietly to stand by and see them commit the vilest acts of oppression, without being able to render the aggrieved redress- a hard case indeed on the poor ryots, who must not look to me with hopes of having their cause enquired into, till such time as the Aumils, zemindars and other creatures of Government have enriched themselves at the expense, nay even their ruin ..."David Trochos (talk) 22:44, 7 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  General problems with the page. 

message: This article states "However these did not materialise into famines due to government intervention".  This isn't right. India did suffer from two famines i.e. the Bihar 1966 Famine and the  Maharashtra 1973 Famine.Rubin, Olivier. (2009). The Merits of Democracy in Famine Protection – Fact or Fallacy?. The European Journal of Development Research. 21. 699-717. 10.1057/ejdr.2009.37. It also states "The Maharashtra drought in which there were zero deaths and one which is known for the successful employment of famine prevention policies, unlike during British rule". Again not true.
In Bihar the casualties of the famine are likely to be counted in tens of thousands. This is supported by reports of ‘eye-witness accounts of people eating wild leaves and roots, picking pieces of grain from the dust around railway sidings, undergoing appalling skeletonization, and even starving to death’.Rubin, Olivier. (2009). The Merits of Democracy in Famine Protection – Fact or Fallacy?. The European Journal of Development Research. 21. 699-717. 10.1057/ejdr.2009.37.Drèze, J. (1999) Chapter 3 – famine prevention in India. In: J. Drèze, A. Sen and A. Hussain (eds.) The Political Economy of Hunger. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Less than a decade later, yet another major famine took place in India under a democratic government – the Maharashtra famine of 1973.Rubin, Olivier. (2009). The Merits of Democracy in Famine Protection – Fact or Fallacy?. The European Journal of Development Research. 21. 699-717. 10.1057/ejdr.2009.37. Dyson notes that the famine mortality data for Maharashtra is much better than the Bihar data, and he arrives at a rough estimate of 130000 excess deaths in 1972–1973.Dyson, T. (1993) Demographic responses to famines in South Asia. IDS Bulletin 24 (4): 17–31. This figure is also reproduced in Devereux’s list of twentieth century famines.Devereux, S. (2000) Famine in the Twentieth Century. Brighton, UK: Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. ISD Working Paper 105, http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/bookshop/wp/wp105.pdf.Rubin, Olivier. (2009). The Merits of Democracy in Famine Protection – Fact or Fallacy?. The European Journal of Development Research. 21. 699-717. 10.1057/ejdr.2009.37. Xlhat97 (talk) 01:58, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The article also neglects famines within the former territory of British India after independence outside the Republic of India. There was at least one such major famine whose status as such is not seriously disputed (in Bangladesh in 1974). Were there any others? Hairy Dude (talk) 16:21, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Those famines might be mentioned in passing but are mostly outside the  of this article. They should be dealt with via links to Famine in Pakistan, Famine in Bangladesh, Famine in Nepal, Famine in Burma, Famine in Sri Lanka, &c. in a passing mention or in a #See also section. — LlywelynII 23:54, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Republic of India has suffered from famine and those famines did cause deaths too. 

message: >Famine had been a recurrent feature of life the Indian sub-continental countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, most notoriously during British rule.
was the previous, entirely correct, version of the first sentence.
>Famine had been a recurrent feature of life in the South Asian subcontinent countries of India and Bangladesh, most accurately recorded during British rule.
This edit by a IP address account in Harrogate, England, created this nonsense about a year back, which (1st) is entirely untrue. Modern independent Indian administration may not be perfect but it cares more and pays more attention to Indian suffering. It records it with an accuracy at least as well as the EIC and Raj functionaries. (2nd) is a patent whitewash. Most obnoxiously under Churchill during WWII, the British absolutely knew certain policies exacerbated famine and that legacy is a huge notorious burden relations between the countries now carry. British colonial administration may have kept better notes than the Moguls but the increased level of famine wasn't a byproduct of more modern methods of accounting.
Assuming the IP represents a biased but interested account, people involved in the page please restore the more honest version or at least arrive at a compromise that emphasizes the importance of this topic to the Raj's bad reputation without pretending that it was a statistical mistake. — LlywelynII 23:40, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: [[WP:BIAS]]