Why was there a sudden spurt in famines in colonial India since the mid-eighteenth century? Give reasons.

Introduction

Within five years of the Company acquiring Bengal's Diwani, the famine of 1770 killed an estimated one-third of Bengal's population — the first in a long chain of colonial famines that struck with a frequency pre-colonial India had not seen.

Reasons for the spurt in famines

• Rigid revenue extraction: high land revenue was collected in full even in drought years — Bengal's collections were maintained through 1770 — leaving peasants with no reserves.
• Commercialisation of agriculture: forced and market-driven shifts to indigo, opium, cotton and jute displaced food crops from the best lands.
• Deindustrialisation: ruined artisans crowded onto agriculture, deepening pressure on subsistence.
• Grain exports amid scarcity: railways and ports moved foodgrain out of famine tracts towards markets and export even as local prices soared.
• Laissez-faire dogma: relief was treated as market distortion — visible in the Orissa famine (1866) and Lytton's restrictive policy during the Great Famine of 1876–78.
• Collapse of traditional buffers: village grain reserves, community irrigation and local patronage networks decayed under the new revenue settlements.
• Entitlement failure: as Amartya Sen showed, famines flowed from the collapse of purchasing power, not absolute food shortage — colonial policy destroyed precisely those entitlements.

Conclusion

Colonial famines were thus natural droughts intensified into mass mortality by policy. The Famine Commission (1880) and the Famine Codes were corrections that came only after a century of avoidable deaths.