The Famine in India

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 5, 1867

The Famine in India.

A Million People, or One-third More than the Entire Population of Michigan, Starved to Death.

MR. T. RAVINSHAW, Commissioner of Orissa, has sent to the Bengal Government a report of the famine in that Province. Never has so heart-rending a picture been drawn. An official whose bias, if it exists, must lead him to tone down the horrible facts, estimates the loss of life from want of food and its consequences at from 500,000 to 600,000, and in some places at three-fourths of the whole population. This is among the four and half millions of Orissa alone, where the official reports show the deaths to be still going on at the rate of 150 a day. The mortality was not less severe proportionally in the adjoining district of Midnapore, with its population of more than half a million. In Ganjam, with nearly a million of people, the calamity was comparatively light, but famine, disease and debility swept away thousands. The same is true of Chota Nagpore. We have a reliable record of the deaths of paupers from famine-stricken districts in Calcutta. Add to all these the mortality in the other districts of Bengal from Saugor Island to Patna and the border of Nepaul, and we have a record of the loss of life, which exceeds in horror and extent that of any one of the six great droughts of India during the last century. Before the destroying angel takes his final flight the tale will have mounted up beyond a million known deaths. This is worse than in the great famine which carried off 800,000 people from the north western Doab in 1838. We have reason to believe that the most terrible of all recorded afflictions of this kind, that of 1780, was not more ruthless in its murderous work than this which still demands its daily holocaust. For the greater part of that million of deaths has occurred not over a wide extent of territory, nor among millions of people, but within an area not larger than that of England and Wales, and among a people who do not exceed six millions in number. No plague, no black death, no yellow fever, no great physical convulsion like the most tremendous earthquake on record, has engulfed so many victims. The last famine, of which Baird Smith was the alleviator and historian, carried off half a million, or only a twenty-sixth of the thirteen millions affected, and the starvation price of food was never higher than 7½ seers the rupee. This, ere it closes, will have swallowed up a sixth of the people, among whom rice sometimes was not to be had at all, and for many a long month not lower than 6 seers the rupee.—Friend of India.