In 1896-97, for example, an 11% deficit measured across much of north India, alongside food shortages across the country, killed an estimated five million people.īut in 1843, rain levels were above average, the study found.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Wellcome Library Image Catalogue/Public Domain “There have been no major famines since independence,” Vimal Mishra, the lead researcher and an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, told CNN, “And so we started our research thinking the famines would have been caused by drought due to factors such as lack of irrigation.” Willoughby Wallace Hooper’s photos of the famine. However, one famine was completely due to the failure of policy during the British era,” the study’s abstract reads. “We find that a majority of famines were caused by large-scale and severe soil moisture droughts that hampered the food production. The now-infamous accusation has now been confirmed to be true by a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, where researchers in India and the US used weather data to gauge the amount of moisture in the soil during six major famines in the subcontinent between 18.Īccording to the study, the famine was caused by Churchill’s policies and not a drought. The researchers found that five of the famines were largely caused by droughts, but in 1943, at the height of the Bengal famine, rain levels were above average.Īlso read: Digging Up British Empire’s Bloody Legacy in India
Yet that reputation has not remained untarnished, particularly for the role he and his wartime cabinet played in exacerbating the Bengal famine on 1943 which killed three million Indians. Few statesmen have the reputation of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders Europe has ever seen.
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