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Famine Prevention and Irrigation T he implementation of the recommendations of the royal commission on India, especially through the newly created sanitary commissions, did result in improved health and reduced mortality for the British Army in India. As we have seen, Nightingale next took on the health of civilians, and considerable progress was made in reducing preventible mortality in that massive population. Improvements in infrastructure, such as sewers, canals and drainage systems, benefited the entire population, of course, but offsetting those gains in public health were periodic famines. Famines were mainly occasioned by prolonged droughts and the failure of monsoon rains, but sometimes also by excessive monsoon rains1 and floods. Famines left ‘‘the affected population relatively defenceless against infectious disease.’’2 Food crises led to elevated mortality. In the second half of the nineteenth century in India, the period of British rule coinciding with Nightingale’s work, an estimated 29 million people died of famine. Nightingale herself referred to the estimate of a major famine roughly every ten or eleven years. There were many famines across India between 1861 and 1908: in 1861-67 there were famines in the North West Provinces, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa; in 1876-79 in Bengal, Bihar, the Deccan, Oudh, Bombay, Madras and Mysore (the ‘‘Great Famine’’); in 1896-97 in Oudh, Bengal, Punjab and the Central Provinces; in 1899-1902 in Punjab, Rajputana and Gujarat. There was also plague in Bombay in 1896-97. As during the terrible Irish ‘‘potato famine’’ of 1845, food was exported from famine districts while people were starving. Nightingale often cited Ireland as an example in trying to persuade W.E. Gladstone to take as strong a leadership role on India as he had on Ireland, even to lead a new liberal approach to India as he had to Ireland, but he never did. 1 See Ronald E. Seavoy, Famine in Peasant Societies 263. 2 Arup Maharatna, The Demography of Famines 7. / 703 The Orissa famine,3 which culminated in 1866, was the first to occur after Nightingale started to work on India; it had a strong impact on her and increased her sensitivity to the problem (see p 709 below). The early stages of the famine coincided with the intense period of data collection and analysis for the royal commission. It evidently worsened in 1866, to kill an estimated million people—a rough estimate since there was no census then. The worst part occurred during John Lawrence’s viceroyalty but there is no correspondence between him and Nightingale on it. There was occasional coverage of the famine in the press in England, and occasional mentions in Parliament . Lawrence himself was active in famine relief, a point made in the inquiry put into place by the British government in 1866. The governor of Bengal, Sir Cecil Beadon, was ill during the worst period and went to the hills. He accordingly was exonerated by the inquiry, but one must wonder about a government structure that would fail so badly on account of the illness of a foreign official. The commission of inquiry’s lengthy report was published in August 1867.4 Nightingale read it and from then on famine prevention became a major concern. Before 1867 it seems Nightingale was simply not aware of the seriousness of famine in India. The first clearly dated mention of famine in Nightingale material occurs only on 30 July 1867, in a letter to Douglas Galton. Beadon’s defence she described as ‘‘pitiable.’’ She faulted Lord Elgin’s administration for the inability to act quickly; Lawrence ‘‘struggled (in vain)’’ against the ‘‘dead weights around him’’ (see p 586 above). The dominant political philosophy of the time was laissez-faire liberalism , or a principled rejection of active intervention by government in the free market economy, a policy with which Nightingale and social reformers disagreed. The famine commissioner, Sir George Campbell, himself related in his memoirs that the members of the Board of Revenue ‘‘held by the most rigid rules of the driest political economy, and had the most unwavering faith in the ‘demand and supply’ theory.’’ They ‘‘rejected almost with horror’’ the proposal to 3 See Bidyut Mohanty, ‘‘Orissa Famine of 1866: Demographic and Economic Consequences.’’ 4 East India (Bengal and Orissa Famine). Papers and Correspondence Relative to the Famine in Bengal and Orissa, Including the Report of the Famine Commission and the Minutes of the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal and the Governor General of India, in Parliamentary Papers 31 May 1867. 704...

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