Bande Mataram

The Famine near Calcutta

29-October-1906

The heartrending accounts of the famine received from Diamond Harbour by the Statesman, of which we print the latest elsewhere, ought to be [............] for those who think [..................] best and the present [........................] Government we could possibly have in India. Yet it is nothing compared to the grisly and terrible shape that Famine can take when it is in earnest. That grim occasional visitor of ours has, under the economical effects of the present rule, ceased to be occasional and taken up her home in our midst. But Bengal has not yet seen her unveiled face, and those of us who have seen the great famine on the other side of India, those terrible bare fields void of all but death, the fair plough-lands stripped of crops and of cattle, the dreadful corpses on roadside and field that had once been kindly living men and women, the listless moving skeletons who should have been merry children,—they most fervently of all will pray that no such sight will ever be repeated in their own province. Yet even what is happening is terrible enough. Miss Gillbert cries out against the cold indifference and heartless economy of the relief officer but that also is not new to those who saw the famine of 1899. We cannot expect more from the bureaucracy than a businesslike official relief; they are not our flesh and blood that they should feel for us as brothers. They will not admit famine until they are compelled and even then will organize relief with efficiency indeed but without bowels of feeling and with a cold businesslike economy. Nor can we expect them to fix the price of grain or prevent export, as the now deposed Holkar did in Indore to save his people. What we can expect from them, they do; to expect more would be folly. Meanwhile what are

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we doing ourselves? We have collected small sums of money through scattered agencies and distributed them to the stricken districts, we have made some attempt to send rice at cheap rates; but it is all so inadequate. It is the old, old lesson. There is the thought, there is the will, but there is not the organization. In Barisal there is organization and the famine has been manfully fought. In another part of the new province a still more efficient organization of the educated community kept down the price of food and saved the district. But why are these merely scattered exceptions! Because we have depended for all things on the bureaucracy and made no attempt to organize ourselves as a race to deal with our own problems.