Bengal Famine of 1943 - Lack of Statistics

Lack of Statistics

Lack of statistics was an important cause of the failure to recognize and tackle the famine. It was known by administrators and statisticians well before the famine that India’s agricultural production statistics were ‘not merely guesses, “but frequently demonstrably absurd guesses”', ‘entirely untrustworthy’ ‘useless for any purpose’ that ‘no dependable statistics existed in Bengal’ and that what statistics existed ‘were disbelieved by the very Government which issued them’ and that there were ‘no meaningful production statistics’ The raw data were guesses or were ‘invented’. and the averaging procedure increased the error. Senior officers then changed the calculated figures according to their whim: about half the estimates were adjusted and adjustments of 30-40 per cent were common; changes of 60-70 per cent were not unknown. Bengal’s agricultural statistics were particularly bad because of its land tax system. In 1942 a revenue officer would guess at the area planted and the probable yield for a 750,000 acre area to give a crop forecast for that area. These forecasts were aggregated and ‘adjusted’ by successive levels of Department of Agriculture officials. It is not known if the forecasts were adjusted after the cyclone, or on what basis this could be done. There were no measures of actual yields or area. The official First Crop Forecast on 5 October, before the cyclone, was reduced by 6% for the Second Crop Forecast in December, at harvest time, and by a further 6% for the final Third Crop Forecast in February, making it 1.2m tons lower than the ten year average of 6.2m tons. It is not known if these adjustments were meant to allow for the cyclone. However, the Director of Agriculture had believed before the cyclone that his department’s official forecast overstated actual expected production by a quarter. The officials responsible for food, such as Pinell and Braund, used a wide range of other estimates, cross checking them against observable facts. They were able to make use of information revealed in mail censorship such as letters from farmers, landlords and traders on crop yields, as well reports from Special Branch (the secret police), reports from other departments etc. Traders acted on their belief of a serious shortage and made a lot of money. They warned the Bengal Government of a famine situation. These sources all indicated that a famine was imminent, and that the Crop Forecasts were wrong. Subsequent research done by the Indian Statistical Institute using statistically valid samples and crop cutting showed large errors, with survey estimates being between 47% and 153% of the official estimate. The discrepancies also vary from year to year, with the sample estimate of the jute crop being 2.6% above the official estimate in 1941 and 52.6% above it in 1946. This rules out analysis based on the level of the production forecast and, in particular, on year to year differences in production forecasts.

There are some figures on shipping and rail deliveries of rice to Calcutta, but none on imports by Bengal as a whole – most trade being informal, by river boat. There are no statistics on public or private stocks, until some commercial stock figures were kept in 1943.

The number of people to be fed was not known. The Census of Population was known to be unreliable at best, and the 1941 Census was particularly badly conducted. There are no statistics on the number of refugees from Burma, nor the refugees from Bengal, escaping war, bombing and famine. Details of military requirements and procurement have not been published. There is no indication of how much food the military provided to Bengali soldiers and war workers.