When a team of researchers in India and the US led by Professor Vimal Mishra reconstructed the soil samples for Bengal in 1943, a period in which 3 million Bengalis died from famine, they found moisture levels in the soil were more than the normal. For five other periods of famine, from 1870 to 2016, Mishra and his colleagues found evidence of drought in the soil samples they created, using meteorological data. But the 1943 famine was due to “complete policy failure”, they write.
The study conducted by the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, the India Meteorology Department and the University of California in Los Angeles, was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in February. It’s the latest evidence in a body of empirical research indicting second world war hero Sir Winston Churchill for the murder of 3 million Bengalis in the Indian subcontinent in 1943.