ABSTRACT
The established system of combating famines was based on the assumption that somewhere or other there would always be grain enough in India to feed the whole population, and that the essential precaution was to see that the people had money enough to pay the enhanced prices. A famine of cotton cloth afflicted India before the monsoon failure of 1918 produced its full effect on the retail market in grain. In the interval the biennial meeting of the Indian Board of Agriculture took place at Pusa in December 1919. The Famine Committee had to deal with the most important and difficult question before the Board. People anticipated a clamour demanding that the Government should fix maximum prices, and agreed that to do so would only aggravate the evil; to try to control prices without controlling supplies would be worse than futile.
