The Bengal Famine of 1770, known in Bengali as the Chiyāttarer Mannantar (the famine of '76, after the Bengali year 1176), was a mass mortality event that devastated the lower Gangetic plain — present-day West Bengal, Bihar, and Bangladesh — between 1769 and 1770. It struck after the East India Company had acquired the Diwani of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa under the Treaty of Allahabad (1765), which granted the Company the right to collect revenue while the Nawab retained nominal administration — the system Robert Clive termed the Dual Government. Contemporary estimates, repeated by colonial administrators including Warren Hastings, placed the death toll at roughly ten million, approximately one-third of the affected population. The proximate cause was the failure of the monsoon and a shortfall in the autumn (aman) rice crop of 1769, compounded by a smallpox epidemic.
While drought was the trigger, the catastrophe is understood as a man-made disaster of Company revenue policy. Under the Dual Government, revenue collection was farmed out to Indian intermediaries, and the Company, through officials such as Mohammad Reza Khan, continued — and in places raised — the land revenue demand even as cultivators died. Revenue collection reportedly rose during the famine years, and the Company made no serious effort at relief while its servants engaged in private grain trade and hoarding for profit. The agrarian economy of Bengal was hollowed out: vast tracts of arable land fell out of cultivation, weavers and artisans perished, and the social fabric of the countryside collapsed. The famine exposed the rapacity of the Dual Government and the moral bankruptcy of revenue extraction divorced from administrative responsibility.
The famine had decisive institutional consequences. It precipitated the abolition of the Dual Government by Warren Hastings in 1772 and the shifting of the treasury and administration directly under Company control, with Hastings moving the capital functions to Calcutta. The ruin of Bengal's finances and the Company's near-bankruptcy fed directly into British parliamentary intervention, producing the Regulating Act of 1773, which created the office of Governor-General of Bengal. Hastings also experimented with revenue settlements — the five-year quinquennial settlement of 1772 and the annual settlements that followed — which culminated, under Lord Cornwallis, in the Permanent Settlement of 1793. The famine cast a long literary and nationalist shadow: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay set his novel Anandamath (1882), source of Vande Mataram, against the famine and the Sannyasi Rebellion it provoked.
For the UPSC Modern History paper (GS Paper I and the optional), the Bengal Famine of 1770 is a high-yield topic linking the consequences of the Battle of Buxar (1764), the Dual Government, and the transition to direct Company administration. Examiners typically ask candidates to evaluate the famine as a consequence of Company revenue policy rather than mere natural calamity, to connect it to the Regulating Act of 1773, or to trace its place in the evolution of land revenue systems. It also appears in prelims as a factual anchor for dates, death tolls, and the Bengali nomenclature Chiyāttarer Mannantar.
Example
In 1770, under the East India Company's Dual Government established by Robert Clive after the 1765 Diwani grant, an estimated ten million Bengalis died while revenue collection continued largely undiminished.
Frequently asked questions
Although triggered by monsoon failure and a poor 1769 rice crop, the East India Company under the Dual Government continued and even raised land revenue collection during the famine. Officials hoarded grain for private profit and provided no relief, magnifying the mortality far beyond what the drought alone would have caused.