Famines, Scarcity and Food Security

Detailed chapter description

Scarcity has repeatedly exposed the relationship between ecology, markets, household resources and public authority in Mithila, Vajji and Anga. A failed monsoon or damaged rice crop could begin a crisis, but famine emerged only when households lost effective access to food: grain prices rose faster than wages, cattle and tools were sold, seed was eaten, credit contracted, employment failed, or transport could not move food from surplus to deficit areas. The same region therefore experienced radically different outcomes in 1770, 1873–74 and 1896–97. In 1769–70 severe drought interacted with Company revenue extraction, grain procurement, weak relief and epidemic disease to produce catastrophic mortality in Bihar. In 1873–74, by contrast, the colonial government imported enormous quantities of rice, created depots, organized transport and inspected villages on a scale unprecedented in the province; mortality was correspondingly much lower, though the operation was criticized as excessively expensive. The famine of 1896–97 showed a third pattern: formal famine codes and improved communications existed, yet distress was sharply uneven, with Darbhanga requiring very large relief operations while parts of north Monghyr escaped crop failure but still suffered high prices among the landless poor. This chapter therefore treats famine not as an event label but as a social process. It reconstructs scarcity through harvests, prices, wages, entitlements, migration, relief and mortality, and it keeps contemporary evidence separate from later administrative memory. The history of food security is the history of how these layers were connected—and of how public policy sometimes broke, and sometimes failed to break, the chain.