Between 1876 and 1902 British India suffered a sequence of severe famines: the Great Famine of 1876-78 in the Madras Presidency, Bombay Deccan, Mysore and Hyderabad; the famine of 1896-97; and that of 1899-1900. Each followed monsoon failure associated with El Nino events, and each occurred in a colony with railways capable of moving grain, an export trade that continued through the crises, a land revenue demand that continued to be collected, and a relief doctrine shaped by the fear of encouraging dependence, which imposed wage and task tests on relief works. Famine Commissions reported in 1880, 1898 and 1901 and produced the Famine Codes. Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts argues that the deaths were the product of imperial economic and political decisions rather than of drought alone; Tirthankar Roy replies that famines resulted from geography and low state capacity, that pre-colonial famine data are too poor to support claims that famines became more frequent under British rule, and that railways, irrigation and administrative capacity ended famine mortality after about 1900. Both positions are held by serious scholars and neither is adjudicated here.
Successive monsoon failures in British India produced famines whose mortality is attributed by different historians to colonial revenue, trade and relief policy or to drought and limited state capacity
The 1881 census counted about 253.9 million people, rising to 287.3 million in 1891 and 294.4 million in 1901 — the flat decade of the 1890s itself reflecting famine mortality. Excess-death estimates for the Great Famine of 1876-78 run from about 5.5 million to 10 million and for the famines of 1896-97 and 1899-1902 from about 6 million to 19 million, with the higher figures associated with Mike Davis and the lower ones with historians who emphasise drought and disease over policy.
The lower end aggregates the official Famine Commission estimates and the more conservative demographic reconstructions from census intervals for the three major famines: roughly five and a half million for 1876-78 and about a million for 1899-1900 on official figures. The upper end follows Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts, which puts deaths in the El Nino famines of 1876-1902 across India, China and Brazil in the tens of millions and gives figures for India at the top of the published range; these rest on higher assumptions about normal mortality and on nineteenth-century estimates such as William Digby's. Indian vital registration was incomplete throughout, so every figure derives from comparing decennial censuses with projected population, and Roy argues that the population declines observed in 1872-81 and 1891-1901 cannot bear the causal weight placed on them.
India