The Bengal Famine of 1943
Wartime policy, not crop failure, starves an estimated three million people in a province still under British rule
Quick facts
- Region
- Bengal and Orissa, British India
- Estimated deaths
- Contested; commonly cited at about 3 million, with a wider range of 800,000 to 3.8 million
- Wartime context
- Feared Japanese invasion after the fall of Burma
What happened
A famine struck Bengal and Orissa in 1943, during the Second World War, killing an estimated three million people from starvation and diseases worsened by malnutrition and population displacement. Unlike most famines, this one was not primarily caused by a shortfall in food production: rice supplies were only marginally below the five-year average and were actually higher than in 1941, a year with no famine. Wartime inflation drove food grain prices up by more than 300 percent between 1939 and 1943 while agricultural wages rose only 30 percent, pricing labourers out of the market for rice they had previously been able to afford. British authorities in London, anticipating a Japanese invasion after the fall of Burma, restricted the movement of boats and grain within Bengal under a scorched-earth policy and limited shipping allocated for relief, citing wartime shortages, even as food continued to be exported to other parts of the war effort.
Why it matters
The economist Amartya Sen's analysis of the 1943 famine, built on his own childhood memory of it, established that mass starvation can occur without any real drop in the total food supply when wartime economic policy destroys the purchasing power of the poorest people, a finding that reshaped how famines are studied and prevented worldwide.
How we know
Research published through the U.S. National Institutes of Health's PubMed Central and the University of Sheffield's History Matters project both examine wartime administrative records and economic data showing the famine was compatible with only a marginal decline in Bengal's actual rice supply.
Sources
- PubMed Central, U.S. National Institutes of Health. Colonial Biopolitics and the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 · Peer-reviewed (author-declared)pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · Cited as a "journal" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- History Matters, University of Sheffield. The 1943 Bengal Famine: Emotional Landscapes of Hunger · Reputable sourcehistorymatters.sites.sheffield.ac.uk · The domain "historymatters.sites.sheffield.ac.uk" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- Ancient India → · A second Bengal famine under British rule, this time during global war