Famines, Scarcity and Food Security

Research record

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.

Section index

1. 58.1 Famine is a social process, not simply a failed harvest
2. 58.2 Food security had four linked dimensions: harvest, market, household and state
3. 58.3 The regional ecology produced both abundance and recurrent risk
4. 58.4 Grain prices were often a more immediate danger to the poor than aggregate shortage
5. 58.5 The 1768–69 drought created a deteriorating subsistence base before the catastrophe of 1770
6. 58.6 Patna provides unusually vivid contemporary evidence for the famine of 1770
7. 58.7 Tirhut, Darbhanga and the eastern districts were not peripheral to the 1770 disaster
8. 58.8 Revenue pressure deepened vulnerability even when remissions were discussed
9. 58.9 Grain procurement and market intervention were limited and often contradictory in 1770
10. 58.10 Mortality in 1770 was produced by hunger, disease and social dislocation together
11. 58.11 The famine reshaped land, labour and settlement after the rains returned
12. 58.12 Golghar symbolizes the administrative memory of scarcity more than an effective famine system
13. 58.13 Between 1770 and 1873 the colonial state accumulated information and transport capacity
14. 58.14 The 1873–74 Bihar scarcity began with failure of the rice crop in north Bihar
15. 58.15 Early warning transformed the 1873–74 response
16. 58.16 Massive grain import made 1873–74 a logistics experiment
17. 58.17 The temporary line toward Darbhanga turned relief into infrastructure
18. 58.18 Depots and village inspection tried to connect imported grain to local need
19. 58.19 Relief works converted public spending into both food access and infrastructure
20. 58.20 Gratuitous relief remained essential for those who could not work
21. 58.21 The low mortality of 1873–74 became both a policy success and a political controversy
22. 58.22 Relief policy after 1874 increasingly sought rules, thresholds and codes
23. 58.23 Famine codes changed what the state measured
24. 58.24 The famine of 1896–97 revealed sharp regional inequality within Bihar
25. 58.25 Darbhanga in 1897 shows the mature colonial relief apparatus at scale
26. 58.26 Market integration could protect consumers and also transmit scarcity
27. 58.27 Household coping strategies reveal the hidden cost of scarcity
28. 58.28 Famine burden was unequal by class, gender, age and occupation
29. 58.29 Disease, sanitation and public health were inseparable from food relief
30. 58.30 Conclusion: food security depended on institutions that could interrupt the chain from shock to destitution

Cite this record

Gajendra Thakur. “Famines, Scarcity and Food Security.” Videha Digital Research Archive: Mithila–Vajji–Anga. Videha — https://www.videha.co.in/ · ISSN 2229-547X · GitHub mirror: https://videha-ejournal.github.io/videha/ · Digital Research Archives on GitHub: https://github.com/videha-ejournal. https://videha-ejournal.github.io/mithila-vajji-anga/records/history/social-58/