Indian famine of 1896–1897

[1] Although relief was offered throughout the famine-stricken regions in accordance with the Provisional Famine Code of 1883, the mortality, both from starvation and accompanying epidemics, was very high: approximately one million people are thought to have died.

"[3] The Famine Commission of 1880 had made special provisions for the relief of weavers, who practised the only trade other than agriculture that employed rural Indians.

[5] The commission had recommended that weavers be given relief by offering them monetary advances for weaving coarse cloth or wool that could then be used in poor-houses or hospitals.

[5] However, by 1896, the rural weavers in the Bombay Presidency, who were now having to compete with the increasing number of local cotton mills, were already in dire economic straits.

[6] In Chota Nagpur, East India, awareness of the famine came late in 1896 when it was discovered that the rice crop in the highlands of Manbhum district had failed entirely on account of very little rain the previous summer.

[7] The region also had a large proportion of tribal groups including Santals and Mundas who had traditionally relied on forest produce for some of their food intake.

[8] The tribal groups, whose accessible forests were now few and far between, consequently, first endured malnutrition and later, in their weakened state, fell prey to a cholera epidemic which killed 21 people per thousand.

[8] Although the famine in the Madras Presidency was preceded by a natural calamity in the form of a drought, it was made more acute by the government's policy of laissez faire in the trade of grain.

[13] Typically, deaths from cholera and dysentery and diarrhoea peaked before the rains as large groups of people collected on a daily basis to receive famine relief.

[12] Malaria epidemics, on the other hand, usually began after the first rains when the famine-afflicted population left the relief-camps for their villages; there, new pools of standing water attracted the mosquito-borne virus to which their already enfeebled condition offered little resistance.

They also defined new rules for relief of "aboriginal and hill tribes" who had been found difficult to reach in 1896–97; in addition, they stressed generous remissions of land revenue.