Timeline of major famines in India during British rule

A "major famine" is defined according to a magnitude scale, which is an end-to-end assessment based on total excess death.

[1] The British era is significant because during this period a very large number of famines struck India.

[17][18][19][20][21] The economist Amartya Sen who won the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in part for his work on the economic mechanisms underlying famines, has stated in his 2009 book, The Idea of Justice:Though Indian democracy has many imperfections, nevertheless the political incentives generated by it have been adequate to eliminate major famines right from the time of independence.

The prevalence of famines, which had been a persistent feature of the long history of the British Indian Empire, ended abruptly with the establishment of a democracy after independence.

The inadequate official response to the Great Famine of 1876–1878, led Allan Octavian Hume and William Wedderburn in 1883 to found the Indian National Congress,[27] the first nationalist movement in the British Empire in Asia and Africa.

The Bengal region shown in a later map (1880)
Oudh , the Doab (land between the Ganges and Jumna rivers), Rohilkhand , the Delhi territories, eastern Punjab , Rajputana and Kashmir , were affected by the Chalisa famine.
Map of India (1795) shows the Northern Circars , Hyderabad (Nizam) , Southern Maratha Kingdom , Gujarat , and Marwar (Southern Rajputana ), all affected by the Doji bara famine.
Map of the North-Western Provinces showing the region severely afflicted by the famine (in blue)
A map showing the Doab region
A 1907 map of Orissa, now Odisha, shown as the southwestern region of Greater Bengal. Coastal Balasore district was one of the worst-hit areas in the Odisha famine of 1866.
Map of Rajputana consisting of the princely states of the Rajputana Agency and the British territory of Ajmer-Merwara, in 1909; the map was little changed since the year of the famine, 1869.
A 1907 map of Bihar , British India , shown as the northern region of Greater Bengal . Monghyr district (top middle) was one of the worst-hit areas in the Bihar famine of 1873–74.
Map of the British Indian Empire (1880), showing where the famine struck. Both years: Madras , Mysore , Hyderabad , and Bombay ); during the second year: Central Provinces and the North-Western Provinces , and a small area in the Punjab
Map from Chicago Sunday Tribune , January 31, 1897, showing the areas in India affected by the famine.
Map of Indian famine of 1899–1900 from Prosperous British India by William Digby
A map of the districts of Bengal, 1943, from Famine Enquiry Commission, Report on Bengal , 1945