After a hiatus

Returning to Blogosphere ....

I am basically interested in famines in India. For the initiated, there was a shortfall in precipitation last year. Basically, there was poor management and though not serious, there was a shortage of food. I was curious as to how famines occured in the past. Also of interest was that most present day pundits claim the famines were at a peak during the British regime and was largely a folly of the foreign occupation. Much of the patriotic view was that India before the Raj was a land of milk and honey and the fragile land was shattered in the hands of the Europeans. This becomes really an irritant more or less as owing to the paucity of pre-colonial era data, the claims generally go unsubstainted. To get the data over the years, I started out with pre-1950 works by British authors. Remarkably, there were meaningful data that could be garned. Most of the information that I am stating is based on secondary references, as I do not have access to the primary records. Also, I have introduced my own biases into the discussion. Also, several places, there has been my discretion as to the years the famines lasted. Also, data points become better as the years become closer to when the British started systematically collecting data. So there are few data points initially, but more in the recent years. Most of the newer ones are more interestingly centered around Bombay. The graph shown below is sort of vague. But each point represents a year having famine (have not distinguished by the cause) and the Y-axis is the year. I will update it soon. I will make my analysis and other facts in the next blog.