CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF INDIA

AND HISTORICAL UNDERPINNINGS

PYQ –

Did the GoI Act , 1935 lay down a

federal constitution. Discuss.(2016,
12.5 Marks)
 British became the decisive rulers over
Bengal and Bihar. The trading company
got Diwani rights over Bengal , Bihar
and Orissa

The East India company Battle of Buxar

1757

1600 1764

Battle of Plassey

Start of British Rule in Bengal, tilted

things in the favour of the company.
 DUAL GOVERNMENT UNDER ROBERT
CLIVE 1765-72

Diwani Nizamat

Great Bengal Famine of 1770-73 causing death

of about 10 million people.
 REGULATING ACT,
1773

BEGINNING OF
CENTRALISATION

Governor of Bengal
A supreme court
was made the
was set up at
Governor General
Calcutta.
of Bengal.

Warren Hastings
PITTS To increase the
control of British
INDIA parliament over the
affairs of the
ACT company.
1784 It made clear between
the commercial and
political functions of
the company.

COMMERCIAL
Court of
directors
POLITICAL AFFAIRS
Board of
Control
CHARTER ACTS
CHARTER Extended the monopoly of trade of East India
ACT OF company for another 20 years
1793

CHARTER Ending the monopoly.

ACT OF
1813 Allowed Christian missionaries to operate.

Ended the monopoly of trade except trade in tea

and trade with china.
 Final step towards centralization
CHARTER
ACT OF Ending the commercial functions of company and
reducing it to a purely administrative body.

1833 Lord William Bentinck was the first Governor-

General of India

Law member added.

Attempted to introduce a system of open

competition for selection of civil servants .

CHARTER No significant change.

ACT OF
1853
 REVOLT OF 1857
 First war of Indian Independence
(Savarkar).
 THE CROWN
RULE:
 QUEEN’S PROCLAMATION -
1st Nov 1858:
 Beginning of “Benevolent
Despotism”.
 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACT 1858
 The company’s rule was terminated
INDIAN COUNCILS ACT
1861

Associating Indians
with legislative
work.

It started restoring
legislative powers
to provincial
councils

Portfolio system.
COUNCIL Members could ask
ACT OF questions on domestic
matters, discuss budget
1892 without right to vote

Nomination of non Provincial legislative

official members at councils
centre by Bengal chamber of
recommendations of: commerce
 Usher in the system of
responsible and representative
government.

Separate communal
electorate for Muslims
GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACT,
1909
Question the executive over
entire aspect of
Administration including
annual budget.

The reform of 1909 afforded no answer

and could afford no answer to Indian Introduce legislative
political problems. proposals of their own.
GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACT 1919
In August 1917 Montagu had informed the House of
Commons that the policy of the British government toward
India was thereafter to be one of “increasing association
of Indians in every branch of the administration, with a
view to the progressive realization of responsible
government in India as an integral part of the empire.”
 CENTRAL GOVERNMENT:
 It introduced bicameral legislature at the centre.
 The subjects were divided into central and provincial list

 PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENTS:
 Introduction of Dyarchy in the provinces.
 Provincial subjects were divided into:
 Reserved - administered by executive councillors
 Transferred- Administered by elected ministers.
 Executive councilors were not responsible to the legislature whereas
ministers were responsible to the legislative councils as well as
governors.
The Muddiman committee(1924) had concluded that it was
unworkable. Tilak declared the reforms as "sun without
morning" and Annie Besant declared it as "unworthy to be
offered by the British and unworthy to be accepted by the
Indians".

Dyarchy, instead of responsible government had set up

irresponsible bureaucracy on one hand and puppet
ministers on the other.

Dyarchy was a “cumbersome, complex, confused” system

having no logical basis, rooted in compromise.
GOVERNMENT Federal form of government
OF INDIA ACT
1935 Three lists and a Federal court to serve the disputes.

Abolished dyarchy in the provinces but introduced dyarchy at the Union.

Provincial autonomy

Introduced bicameralism in six out of eleven provinces.

Governor-General had dictatorial powers.

Retained separate electorate.

Burma was separated

Public service commission for federal as well as provincial government.

Establishment of RBI

“Dominion status” was not conferred by GoI act, 1935.

ANALYSIS
Nehru: “charter of bondage”.--> " a driving car with all
breaks but no engine".

Lord Linlithgow : “best way to maintain British influence in

India, It is no part of our policy to handover the control to
Indians at any pace faster than that which we regard as best
calculated, to hold India to the empire”.

Andrew Muldoon, in his book, “Empire, policies and

creation of 1935 Act” held that it was a means for
continuation of Raj and to deflect the challenges posed by
Gandhi, Nehru and the national movement.

J A Gallagher in his lecture “The decline, revival and fall

of the British empire” held that “Act was designed to
revise the workings and not to weaken the realities of
British power”.
The present constitution takes following features from the act:

1) Federal scheme

2) Office of Governor

3) Emergency provisions

4) Public service commission

5) RBI

6) Administrative details

7) Judiciary

Around 200 provisions of GoI act of 1935 have been

incorporated in the present constitution.
What is famine, and how can we stop it?
The UN is warning that COVID-19 could create a widespread hunger crisis and possibly
famine; what can we do to prevent this?
The COVID-19 coronavirus is affecting virtually all regions of the world. As country after
country has required people to stay at home and economies grind to a halt, the specter of
hunger is emerging. The movement of food, from farms to markets and people’s homes, is
being disrupted, and the poorest and most vulnerable are at risk. The economic crisis and
disruption of the food supply could push an additional half billion people into poverty,
according to estimates by Oxfam and others.
The UN World Food Programme says that there are also already 135 million people facing
chronic food insecurity and they “could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of
2020”and create a “hunger pandemic” and possibly famine.
Is a global famine really a possibility? Let’s look at the definition of the word first.
Famine is not just a lack of food
Dan Maxwell and Nisar Majid’s 2016 book Famine in Somalia has a good definition: “Famine
is broadly understood as ‘an extreme crisis of access to adequate food, manifested in
widespread malnutrition and loss of life due to starvation and infectious disease.’”
In technical terms, a famine is a situation where one in five households experience “an
extreme lack of food and other basic needs where starvation, death, and destitution are
evident.” More than 30 percent of people are “acutely malnourished” and two out of every
10,000 people die from starvation. This set of conditions is the most severe case in a range of
classifications monitored by the “Integrated Food Security Phase Classification” (IPC) that
tracks the availability of food for people and helps governments and aid organizations
anticipate a crisis before people experience famine, what the IPC calls Phase 5. (Phases 2-4
are not very nice situations either, by the way, and as you can see in graphic below, when
people get to the famine stage, they typically have few or no resources to sustain them.)
Famine looks like a lack of food, and most people think it is brought on by a drought, a war,
or an outbreak of disease. And some still believe in debunked 19th-century theories about
“overpopulation” causing famine. But famines are usually caused by multiple factors,
compounded by poor (or even intentionally bad) policy decisions that make people
vulnerable. When no one addresses this vulnerability, it leads to famine.
This is why political scientist Alex de Waal calls famine a political scandal, a “catastrophic
breakdown in government capacity or willingness to do what [is] known to be necessary to
prevent famine.” When governments fail to prevent or end conflict, or help families prevent
food shortages brought on by any reason, they fail their own people.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen a dramatic decline in famines in the last 50
years. Unfortunately there are still some cases of conflict that have plunged millions into
poverty and hunger, making people even more vulnerable to the coronavirus. Civil war in
South Sudan and Yemen has displaced families and cut off food supplies, as well as people’s
access to aid. Conflict and a lengthy, serious drought in Somalia and other parts of the Horn
of Africa has killed off most of the crops and livestock, the main assets for many families. The
situation in the Horn is compounded by climate change and now an upsurge in desert locusts
across East Africa.

I
Entitlement Failure :Understanding Famine
In the late 20th century the work of the Indian economist Amartya Sen led to a major
reorientation in the study of famines. In works such as Poverty and Famines (1981), Sen
challenged the prevailing “FAD hypothesis,” the assumption that total food-availability
decline (FAD) is the central cause of all famines. Sen argued that the more proximate cause
is so-called “entitlement failure,” which can occur even when there is no decline in aggregate
food production.
According to Sen, in every society each person can be thought of as having an “entitlement”
to all possible combinations of the goods and services to which he has access. An entitlement
is a collection of alternative bundles of goods and services from which the person in question
is free to choose. A resident of a homeless shelter, for example, may have an entitlement
consisting of exactly one bundle: a tray of food and a ration of clothes. But a cotton farmer,
who grows sack-loads of cotton each year, can keep the cotton or sell it and buy various
combinations of other goods. All these options constitute his particular entitlement.
A person’s entitlement can change for a number of reasons—for example, variations in the
prices of goods and services, the implementation of new rationing rules, infestations of a
farmer’s crops by pests, or the disruption of food-distribution channels by war. These
examples demonstrate how some segments of the population can perish because of hunger
despite there being no overall shortfall in food production. If, because of an international
glut, the price of cotton collapses in a given year, a village of cotton growers can suddenly
find that their entitlements of food have failed, and they can face starvation.

A good example of an entitlement-based famine without a commensurate shortfall in food

production is the Bengal famine of 1943, which happens to be one of the most intensively
studied famines. Although food production did fall slightly in 1943 compared with previous
years, it was still 13 percent higher than in 1941, when there was no famine. One
phenomenon that did distinguish the year 1943 was inflation, a common consequence of
war. Yet, amid rising commodity prices, the wages paid to agricultural labourers stagnated.
Between 1939 and 1943, food grain prices rose by more than 300 percent, slightly
outstripping the rate of inflation, whereas the wages of agricultural labourers rose by only
30 percent. Agricultural labourers, as a class, were badly hit, which resulted in many deaths.
Yet, even as rural Bengal was being ravaged by famine, the West Bengal capital city,
Calcutta (now Kolkata), was hardly affected. Research has shown that famine-related deaths
in Calcutta occurred primarily among migrants who had come from the villages in search of
food and alms.

The role of policy

Many factors can contribute to entitlement failure. For example, slight imbalances in
production can lead to large increases or declines in price. But government policies can also
cause entitlement failures. It can be argued, for example, that the Bangladesh famine of
1974, which was precipitated by the effects of widespread flooding, would have been less
severe if the state’s food-rationing system had not been in place. The rationing system was
flawed because it provided subsidized rationed food to only the country’s urban population.
In 1974, despite higher-than-usual rice production, there was a slight shortage of per capita
food availability, because the United States temporarily halted routine food aid over its
objections to Bangladesh’s trade with Cuba. If the shortage had been shared out across the
country, there would have been little hardship. But the rationing system kept the supplies of
food in the urban centres, thereby affecting the entitlements of rural Bangladeshis and
ultimately causing famine and some one million deaths.
During the Ethiopian famine of 1973, the country’s overall food productivity did not
decline—in other words, according to the FAD hypothesis, there should not have been a
famine. Yet, in the province of Wollo and to a lesser extent in Tigray, residents suffered
famine exacerbated by entitlement failures that were made worse by the poor system of
transport between regions.
A less proximate cause of famines can be the nature of a country’s political system. As Sen
pointed out, democracy serves as a natural bulwark against famines. In a democratic system
coupled with a free press, the occurrence of a famine will inevitably reduce the popularity of
the government; thus, the fear of being voted out of power motivates democratic
governments to take measures to prevent or at least mitigate famines. In the western Indian
state of Maharashtra, for example, droughts in the early 1970s severely affected a large
area with a population of about 20 million. The resulting food shortages would have caused
a famine if the government had not intervened by delivering food (from buffer stocks) and
initiating massive employment-relief programs. Although there was a small rise in mortality,
there were no recorded “starvation deaths.” In contrast, it is arguable that the catastrophic
kind of famine that occurred in China in 1959–61 could not have happened in a democratic
country. Chinese censorship prevented the world (and the Chinese people themselves) from
understanding the enormity of the famine until well after the tragedy had occurred. Even
decades later, mortality statistics continued to be disputed.
It should be noted that statistics on famine mortality are always difficult to establish,
because, contrary to a widely held view, in most famines only a small proportion of deaths
are the direct result of starvation. The chief cause of death is usually disease, which can
continue long after the famine has officially ended. In the Bengal famine, for example,
deaths from starvation occurred between the critical months of March and November 1943,
but the overall death rate did not peak until later—in the period from December 1943
through December 1944, when most deaths were caused by cholera, malaria, and smallpox.

Prevention and control

In order to be effective, policies designed to prevent or control famines must be based on a
sound understanding of the relationship between markets and food shortages. According to
two traditional but opposing views, food markets exacerbate food shortages and therefore
should be carefully controlled, or they naturally alleviate food shortages and therefore
should be completely unhindered. Both views are flawed: both have caused governments to
act in ways that made famines worse. In many cases, for example, the first reaction of
governments has been to prevent the movement of food between regions, since such activity
is frequently associated with speculation and profiteering. Yet this restriction on trade
reduces the inflow of food into famine-affected regions, despite the fact that scarcity will
have driven up food prices—a consequence that typically attracts more suppliers wishing to
sell. The reduced flow of food caused by trade limitations may well contribute to more
suffering and starvation. The aim should therefore be not to curb profits by restricting trade
but to maximize the flow of food to the regions and population groups hardest hit by
shortages.
Equally faulty, however, is the view that problems will be resolved if the market is left fully to
its own devices. It is based on the assumption that those who need food badly will be
prepared to pay higher prices; if there is no government intervention, therefore, food will
reach those who need it most. This argument makes the fatal mistake of presuming that all
people have the same income. In reality, when people panic about food shortages, the
wealthier in society tend to hoard food for themselves, thereby driving up food prices to
levels beyond what the poor are able to afford.

Contemporary research has shown that famines are best prevented and controlled when
markets are allowed to function but when governments also intervene in appropriate ways.
Private traders should be permitted to move food into affected regions; at the same time,
governments should shore up the buying power of the poor through direct relief or
employment-relief (food-for-work or cash-for-work) programs.
There is continuing debate about whether relief is better provided in the form of food or
cash. The answer is not obvious. Some have argued that if equivalent amounts of food and
cash are being compared, then from the point of view of survival it does not matter which is
given. In most cases, however, the answer depends on how well the relief system works or
on how broadly it covers the population it is supposed to help. A cash-based program makes
sense only if steps are taken to ensure that all those affected by the food shortage obtain
relief. This is especially important in view of the fact that the wide distribution of cash will be
likely to cause food prices in the affected region to rise. In the most acute situations of
famine, therefore, it is usually far more effective to give relief in the form of food.
In his study on famines, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen described two distinct kinds of famine.
The first, what he called FAD (food availability decline), was till then the usual conception of
a famine: starvation caused by disruptions arising from war, repeated rainfall failure, or
pestilence, such as disease, locust infestations, etc. Humans need a certain minimum caloric
intake to survive. If food supply dipped below this point, starvation would ensue.

Sen also drew attention to a second type of famine, which he called FEE (failure of exchange
entitlements), that challenged the common notion of famines as caused by insufficient food
supply. An FEE famine implied starvation even in the midst of plenty. Access to food is class
selective. Even in the worst of famines, the better off usually had access to food. It was the
poor and disadvantaged who starved because there was what Sen called a failure of
exchange entitlements. Unless you produced food directly, access was determined by your
ability to exchange earnings or assets for food. During severe disruptions, demand for labour
collapsed, prices rose, and foodgrain stocks dwindled. The labouring poor were unable to
exchange their labour for food and hence starved and/or migrated.

Most famines in history were a combination of FAD and FEE, with one of the two
predominant in each case. Sen’s study was based primarily on relatively poor agrarian
societies with primitive division of labour. Poor communications and transport constrained
long-distance bulk movements of goods; most of the harvest was produced and consumed
locally with minimal processing. The world changed greatly after the passing of agrarian
empires in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the associated political revolutions that
spawned the welfare state. Modern technology, all-weather roads, railways and motorized
transport enabled the bulk movement of goods from surplus to deficit areas. This made the
great famines of the past a distant memory—despite rapid urbanization, with over 500 cities
housing over a million people each and over 30 megacities of over 10 million living far away
from food sources. The rise of the democratic welfare state also ensured that exchange-
entitlement losses were made good through interventions like employment insurance, food
stamps, etc. Nowadays, one associates famines only with failing agrarian states or
authoritarian setups impervious to pressures from civil society.
Today, the public policy response to the covid-19 pandemic raises the spectre of a third type
of famine, namely a failure of supply chains (FSC) famine, peculiar to post-industrial societies
based on intricate divisions of labour and complex, dispersed supply chains. Dense urban
conglomerations consume a large variety and quantity of processed packaged food that is
grown, aggregated and processed at multiple locations far from their place of final re-
aggregation and consumption. Just think of the amount of food that needs to get into a big
city each day, and what were to happen if these supply chains were disrupted.
Administrative lockdowns of cities, regions and indeed whole countries are a big leap into
the dark. As a result of India’s lockdown, several grocery items went out of stock in retail
outlets, although unprocessed food like cereals, dairy supplies, fruit and veggies are still
available. Anything in need of processing is fast vanishing, as supply chains for processed
foods are frictional.
On the other hand, demand for and the prices of unprocessed foodstuff, like veggies, fruits,
food grain and dairy products, are going down in their places of origin because of broken
supply chains on one hand, and the loss of exchange entitlements on the other. The fiscal
and administrative capacities of poor countries like India to cushion the failure of these
exchange entitlements on a large enough scale, even in normal times, are limited.

Modern societies are too complex to shut down. It is impossible to gauge all the linkages and
knock-on effects of such a shutdown. In a world characterized by intricate divisions of labour
and complex supply networks, it is dangerous for the State to cherry-pick
economic/industrial/services through administrative orders based on end-use. This is a
function of the market. If the State fails to mimic its complexity, which is likely, supply
arrangements will collapse.
Consider what making an essential good like a packet of biscuits entails: sowing, harvesting
and transportation of grain and cane; processing into flour and sugar; movement of flour
and sugar to biscuit factories. Likewise for preservatives, salt, colouring agents, and essence;
and also the paper, ink, adhesives, etc., needed for packaging biscuits. A disruption at any
stage of their production, maintenance, processing or movement can bring the entire
process to a standstill. Will all these associated activities be placed within the ambit of
essential services?

In today’s world, more than ever before, a battle can be lost for want of a nail—or biscuits
for the want of adhesives and ink.

It would be far more prudent if general guidelines were issued on how social distancing and
hygiene could be enforced in different economic activities, and how the safe movement of
passengers and goods can be done in various economic activities, rather than exempting and
allowing particular activities. We have been there before. The State fared disastrously in its
effort to direct economic activity as it saw fit.
Alok Sheel is RBI chair professor at ICRIER