Three million die in a British province with enough food to feed them
What happened
In 1943, a famine swept the Indian province of Bengal, then under British colonial rule, killing an estimated three million people from malnutrition or disease. The famine did not happen because Bengal ran out of food: 1943's harvest was not exceptionally poor, and economist Amartya Sen, who witnessed the famine as a nine-year-old boy, later concluded it was instead what he called an entitlement failure, a collapse in the ability of poor and rural people to actually purchase the food that existed, driven by wartime grain-price inflation, military stockpiling for troops overseas, and the loss of rice imports after Burma fell to Japan in 1942.
Why it matters
Sen's later academic analysis of Bengal, part of the body of work that helped win him a Nobel Prize in economics, established that mass starvation can occur without any absolute shortage of food, reshaping how economists and famine-relief organizations since have thought about hunger as a distribution and purchasing-power problem rather than a supply one alone. Despite a death toll on the same order as far better-known WWII catastrophes, the Bengal famine remains largely absent from popular Western accounts of the war.
How we know
The Encyclopaedia Britannica's account of the 1943 Bengal famine documents the death toll, the absence of any real production shortfall that year, and Sen's own entitlement-failure explanation, drawing on his published economic analysis of the famine's causes.
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica. Bengal famine of 1943 · Reputable sourcebritannica.com · The domain "britannica.com" is on our Reputable source registry.
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