ABSTRACT
Scottish MP Smollett also found fault with the government’s response to the famine, calling the English administrators in India lackadaisical, inept and ‘heartless’ in their decision-making and oversight of the famine while people were ‘dying in heaps’ around them. The Lord Mayor’s response represents a clear shift away from depending upon the vagaries of private charity and towards the expectation that government should play the major role in times of distress. The famine commenced with the failure of the crops in 1865, and though that fact was thoroughly known to the officials and to the Supreme Government, the only alacrity shown was by the Board of Revenue, and that alacrity was of a mischievous kind, for they amused themselves by dispatching circular orders, stating, among other things, that the starving people must depend on private liberality, and that at the time when starvation and death were rife.
