The Orissa famine, like all Indian famines…

The Orissa famine, like all Indian famines of the nineteenth-century, had been preceded by a drought: the population of the region depends on the rice crop of the winter season for their sustenance; however, the monsoon of 1865 had been scanty and had stopped prematurely.

In addition, the Bengal Board of Revenue had made incorrect estimates of the number of people who would need help and had been misled by fictitious price lists.

Consequently, as the food reserves began to dwindle, the gravity of the situation is not grasped until the end of May 1866, and by then the monsoons have set in.

Efforts to ship the food to the isolated province are hampered because of bad weather, and when some shipments do reach the coast of Orissa, they cannot be moved inland.

The British Indian government imports some ten thousand tons of rice, which reaches the affected population only in September.

Although many people die of starvation, more are killed by cholera before the monsoons and by malaria afterwards.

In Orissa alone, at least one million people, a third of the population, die in 1866.