Revision 827622014 of "User:SlimVirgin/draft" on enwiki

==Who died?==
{{further|Bengal famine of 1943}}
Article needs a demography section: population, Muslim/Hindu, how many urban/living in villages, family structure (Greenough), who died, male/female, etc. Explain who "priority classes" were; stores on factory premises; workers paid with grain from July 1942 (Greenough). 80,000–150,000 villagers moved to Calcutta after July.

* [[Cormac Ó Gráda]]: "The main losers in Bengal—unskilled workers, petty artisans, landless farm laborers, and their dependents ..." (Ó Gráda 2009, p. 190).

* Greenough: "[F]amine deaths were strictly a rural phenomenon" (p. 213). "Who were the principal famine victims and what were their means of survival? It is possible to answer the first query in some detail ..." (Greenough 1980, pp. 215–216).

* Greenough: "The survey revealed that 1.076 million persons, out of Bengal's estimated 55.2 million rural inhabitants, were destitute after the famine year."

----
*Wikipedia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bengal_famine_of_1943&oldid=762218642 27 January 2017]): "[T]he highest mortality was not in previously very poor groups, but among artisans and small traders whose income vanished when people spent all they had on food and did not employ cobblers, carpenters, etc". Source: Mahalanobis, P. C.; Mukherjea, Ramkrishna; Ghosh, Ambika (1946). ''A Sample Survey of the After-Effects of the Bengal Famine of 1943''. Calcutta: Statistical Publishing Society. Also published in ''Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics'', 7(4) (Jul 1946), pp. 337–400. {{jstor|25047881}}

*Wikipedia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bengal_famine_of_1943&oldid=826776857 20 Feb 2018] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bengal_famine_of_1943&oldid=774429794 8 April 2017]): Not clear: "Any civilians who were not members of these groups [prioritised groups] (in particular, labourers in rural areas) received severely reduced access to food and medical care, and this limited access was principally available only to those who arrived at "cities and selected district towns".[86] Outside of these selected locations, '... vast areas of rural eastern India were denied any lasting state-sponsored distributive schemes' for food and medical aid,[171] placing the rural poor in direct competition for scarce supplies and basic needs with workers in public agencies, war-related industries, and in some cases even politically well-connected middle-class agriculturalists."[172]

==Effect on women==
Discuss the different ways in which famine affects women and men: reduction in libido, birth rate, muscle v fat (Ó Gráda 2009)
*{{cite book |last=Mukerjee |first=Madhusree |authorlink=Madhusree Mukerjee |title=Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II|date=2010|publisher=Basic Books|location=New York|page=158ff}}
*{{cite journal|last=Ó Gráda|first=Cormac|author-link=Cormac Ó Gráda|title=Revisiting the Bengal Famine of 1943–44 |journal=History Ireland|volume=18|number=4|year=2010|pages=36–39|jstor=27823027}}
*{{cite book|last=Ó Gráda|first=Cormac|author-link=Cormac Ó Gráda|title=Famine: A Short History|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LoN2XkjJio4C|year=2009|publisher=Princeton University Press}}
*{{cite book|last1=Roy|first1=Parama|editor1-last=Ray|editor1-first=Bharati|title=Women of India: Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods|date=2005|publisher=SAGE Publications India|location=New Delhi|pages=392–423|chapter=Women, Hunger, and Famine: Bengal 1350/1943}}
* Greenough, Paul R. (1980). "Indian Famines and Peasant Victims: the Case of Bengal in 1943–44". ''Modern Asian Studies''. 14(2): 205–235. {{jstor|312413}}
*{{cite book|last=Bedi|first=Freda|author-link=Freda Bedi|title=Bengal Lamenting |location=Lahore|url= https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.48599 |date=1944|publisher=Lion Press|page=86ff}}

==Children==
*[http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1944/feb/17/bengal-destitute-children#S5CV0397P0_19440217_HOC_157 Hansard], 17 February 1944.

==Priority classes==
"Concern for Calcutta's 'priority classes' accounted for the forcible requisition of rice from mills and warehouses in and around the city in late December 1942" (Ó Gráda 2010).

==Responsibility==
===Discussion at the time===
*Amery, [http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1943/jun/03/food-situation Hansard], 3 June 1943: "The latest reports from India are that the wheat just reaped is a bumper crop, and the other spring crops are good. The crop is moving slowly to the market and prices are still high. The rice situation still causes anxiety and must continue to do so so long as the Burma crop is lost to us. The chief concern at present is for Bengal and especially Calcutta, where the price of rice is shown as more than eight times pre-war, though this is not true of India generally."
*[http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1943/jul/01/food-situation Hansard], 1 July 1943.
*Amery, [http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1943/jul/14/india-food-supplies Hansard], 14 July 1943: "The present difficult situation is due to a widespread tendency of cultivators to withhold foodgrains from the market, to larger consumption per head as the result of increased family income, to hoarding by consumers and others, and, in many parts of India, to the fact that the methods by which surplus supplies of foodgrains have in normal times moved from areas of production to areas of consumption have ceased to function or been seriously weakened."
*[http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1943/sep/22/india-food-situation Hansard], 22 September 1943.
*Amery, [http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1943/sep/23/india-food-situation Hansard], 23 September 1943.
:*Viscountess Astor: "Will the right hon. Gentleman make it clear to the world that this awful situation is not the fault of the British Government? I would ask him to bear in mind the anti-English propaganda that is going throughout the world about India."
*Amery, [http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1943/oct/12/india-food-situation#S5CV0392P0_19431012_HOC_256 Hansard], 12 October 1943: "At the beginning of the year His Majesty's Government provided the necessary shipping for substantial imports of grain to India in order to meet prospects of serious shortage which were subsequently relieved by an excellent spring harvest in Northern India ... The problem so far as help from here is concerned is entirely one of shipping, and has to be judged in the light of all the other urgent needs of the United Nations. ... As far back as April, 1942, [the central government of India] inaugurated a 'Grow More Food' campaign, which brought 8,000,000 new acres under food crops last year and will bring 12,000,000 this year. In a situation in which the difficulty was mainly, though not entirely, one of distribution, their efforts have been primarily directed to securing grain from surplus areas to meet the needs of the areas in deficit."
*[http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1943/oct/12/food-situation#S5CV0392P0_19431012_CWA_6 Hansard], 12 October 1943: "Captain Gammans asked the Secretary of State for India, what steps he has taken to make known to the United States of America and other parts of the world that the responsibility for dealing with the famine in Bengal rests upon the Bengal Government and not upon the Secretary of State; and that that Government is a constitutional body elected under the provisions of the Government of India Act, 1935?"
*Amery, [http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1943/oct/14/food-situation#S5CV0392P0_19431014_CWA_114 Hansard], 14 October 1943: "Reliable statistics of mortality are not available, but I understand that the deaths in Bengal are estimated at about 1,000 a week including Calcutta but may be higher."
*[http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1943/nov/11/india-food-situation#S5CV0393P0_19431111_HOC_155 Hansard], 11 November 1943.
*Amery, [http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1944/jan/20/food-situation#S5CV0396P0_19440120_HOC_121 Hansard], 20 January 1944: "As the result of relief measures and an excellent winter rice crop there is now no general shortage of food in Bengal. ... There are still no reliable figures, but the Government of India, on the basis of present information, consider that the abnormal mortality due to the famine and to disease in the last five months of 1943 has not exceeded 1,000,000."

===Later views===
*Sen, Amaryta (1981). [https://books.google.com/books?id=FVC9eqGkMr8C&pg=PA55 "The Great Bengal Famine"]. ''Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation''.
*Bowbrick, Peter (May 1986). [http://www.bowbrick.org.uk/Publications/The%20Causes%20of%20Famine%201986.pdf "The causes of famine: A refutation of Professor Sen's theory"]. ''Food Policy''. 11:2, pp. 105–124.
*Allen George (1986). "Famines: The Bowbrick-Sen dispute and some related issues". ''Food Policy''. 11: 3, pp. 259–263.
*Tauger, Mark B. (March 2009). [https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/brs.2009.0004 "The Indian Famine Crises of World War II"]. ''British Scholar'' 1(2), 166–196.
----
* What is the current consensus regarding Sen's position? [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/03/24/truth-about-bengal-famine/]
*Mark B. Tauger:
:*"According to the generally accepted viewpoint, food availability in Bengal was not low enough to have caused a famine.  The key proponent of this viewpoint,  the  economist  Amartya  Sen, uses data from the 1944 Famine Inquiry Commission Report on Bengal in his book ''Poverty and Famines'' to argue that Bengal actually had higher food availability in 1943 than in 1942. Most  studies  of  this famine and others refer to Sen’s chapter without questioning the data or his use of it. Consequently historians have sought the cause of the famine in social, economic, and political factors: wartime inflation intensified by military spending in Bengal, British efforts to deter a Japanese invasion (the rice- and boat-denial policies), hoarding and speculation  by  grain  traders,  and  allegations  of  British  indifference  to  suffering  of Indians and willingness to use famine to suppress opposition.{{pb}} "This 'man-made'  famine  argument,  however,  rests  on  uncritical  acceptance of one set of unreliable statistical data that Sen and others have incorrectly described as 'production data.'" ([https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/brs.2009.0004 Tauger 2009])

* [[Cormac Ó Gráda]]:
:*"A shortcoming of Sen's classic account is its overreliance on the ''Report on Bengal'', and failure to take account of once-confidential correspondence between London, Calcutta, and Delhi in 1943–44. Some of this material has long been in the public domain; some remains unpublished. Its version of the events does not support that in the ''Report''" (Ó Gráda 2009, p. 185).

*Ó Gráda 2010:
:*"At the time, the authorities blamed the unfolding crisis on undue war-induced hoarding by merchants, producers and consumers. The view that the famine was mainly due to market failure in wartime conditions rather than to adverse food supply shocks was popularised in the 1970s and 1980s by Bengal native and 1981 Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen. Sen's now-classic account not only began an academic debate about the Bengal famine but also switched the focus of analysis of famines generally away from food availability decline (FAD) per se to the distribution of, or entitlements to, what food was available. In Bengal, Sen argued, the problem was less the supply of food in 1943 than its distribution; in theory there was enough to feed everybody, but massive speculation, prompted in large part by wartime conditions, meant that a minor shortfall in food availability was transformed into a disastrous reduction in market supplies. Sen's analysis has been enormously influential.