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The Bengal Famine of 1943
The man-made catastrophe that killed between two and three million people while Bengal had adequate food supply — the formative experience of nine-year-old Amartya Sen and the empirical foundation of the entitlement approach.
The Bengal famine of 1943 killed between two and three million people under British colonial rule. Its defining feature, established decisively by Sen's subsequent empirical analysis, was that it was not caused by food shortage. Bengal had approximately the same food supply as in non-famine years. The famine was caused by entitlement failure — the collapse of the economic and institutional mechanisms through which laborers and rural workers could access the food that existed. Wartime inflation destroyed purchasing power. Speculative hoarding removed rice from markets. The colonial government prioritized military supply chains over civilian distribution. Press censorship suppressed the information flow that might have forced governmental response. Sen, nine years old at the time, witnessed laborers and rural workers appearing at his family's home in Dhaka, skeletal and pleading.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The famine's causes were structural, not natural. The 1942 cyclone and rice crop failures that preceded the famine have sometimes