Famine
Topic: Indian Economy on the Eve of Independence · NCERT: Class 11, Ch 1 "Indian Economy on the Eve of Independence"; Class 11, Ch 5 "Rural Development"
Meaning
A famine is a severe shortage of food in which large numbers of people starve and die. Famines were frequent in colonial India because of deep poverty, forced cash-crop farming and poor infrastructure such as the lack of all-weather rural roads. Economist Amartya Sen showed that a famine is often not just a fall in food supply. It is a collapse of poor people's entitlement, meaning their power to get food through wages, crops or assets. After independence, food security made large famines a thing of the past.
Example
The Bengal famine of 1943, during the Second World War, killed about 3 million people. Food supply was not much lower than usual. But wartime price rises meant labourers could no longer afford food.
Don't confuse with
- Drought: a drought is a long period without enough rain. It can cause crops to fail, but a famine happens only when people lose access to food, and that can happen even without a drought.