After a failed monsoon in 1768 and a worse one in 1769, famine struck Bengal and Bihar in 1769-71 in the period of dual government, when the East India Company held the diwani or right to collect land revenue while nominal administration remained with the Nawab. The Company maintained and in some districts increased revenue collection through the famine, its servants engaged in private grain trading, and relief was minimal; contemporary critics in Britain, including Edmund Burke and the Company's own later reviewers, condemned the conduct of its servants, and Warren Hastings reported in 1772 that about a third of the population had died. Modern historians dispute that figure: Rajat Datta's work on Bengal's grain markets argues that the famine was primarily a subsistence crisis driven by harvest failure and market fragmentation and that the one-third figure is unsupportable, while others emphasise the Company's revenue extraction and the absence of the customary relief obligations of Indian rulers. Large districts were depopulated, cultivation reverted to jungle, and the disaster contributed directly to the Regulating Act of 1773 and to the permanent settlement debate. It remains one of the largest mortality events attributed in part to a colonial administration's policy.
The English East India Company held the revenue rights of Bengal and continued collection through a catastrophic harvest failure
There was no census before 1872. Company officials and later writers, above all W. W. Hunter in 'The Annals of Rural Bengal', worked from a presumed population of about 30 million for Bengal and Bihar and concluded that roughly a third of it, some 10 million people, died in 1769-71. Modern historians treat both the base and the death toll as rough, with estimates of mortality ranging from about 1.2 million to 10 million.
The high figure is the traditional one-third-of-population estimate originating in Warren Hastings's 1772 report to the Company's directors and repeated for two centuries. The low figure reflects modern revisionist demography, particularly Rajat Datta's argument that the population base and the mortality rate were both overstated. There was no enumeration of any kind, so both ends are reconstructions.
East India Company correspondence and contemporary British parliamentary criticism, including Burke's, documented continued revenue collection and grain engrossing during mass starvation.
India