Solved Exercise for Precis writing with Title “Mal-administration During Famine in Bengal” Precis for Class 9, 10, 11, 12 and Higher classes.

Passages with Solved Precis

In the meantime, the impulse which Clive had given to the administration of Bengal was constantly becoming fainter and fainter. His policy was to a great extent abandoned; the abuses which he had suppressed began to revive; and at length the evils which a bad government had engendered were aggravated by one of those fearful visitations which the best government cannot avert. In the summer of 1770, the rains failed; the earth was parched up; the tanks were empty; the rivers shrank within their beds and a famine, such as is known only in countries where every household depends for support on its own little patch of cultivation, filled the whole valley of the Ganges with misery and death. Tender and delicate women, whose veils had never been lifted before the public gaze, came forth from the inner chambers in which Eastern jealousy had kept watch over their beauty, threw themselves on the earth before the passers-by and, with loud wailings, implored a handful of rice for their children. The Hooghly every day rolled down Thousands of corpses close to the porticoes and gardens of the English conquerors. The very streets of Calcutta were blocked up by the dying and the dead. The lean and feeble survivors had not energy enough to bear the bodies of their Kindred to the funeral pyre or to the holy river, or even to scare away the jackals and vultures, who fed on human remains in the face of day. The extent of the mortality was never ascertain but it was popularly reckoned by millions. This melancholy intelligence added to the excitement which already prevailed in England on Indian subjects. The proprietors of last Indian stock were uneasy about their dividends. All men of common humanity were touched by the calamities of our unhappy subjects; and indignation soon began to mingle itself with pity. It was rumoured that the Company’s servants had created ite famine by engrossing all the rice of the country; that they: tad sold grain for eight, ten, twelve times the price at which ha i bought it; that one English functionary who, the year before, vas not worth a hundred guineas, had, during that season o’ misery, remitted sixty thousand pounds to London. These rages we believe to have been unfounded. That servants ‘if the Company had ventured, since Clive’s departure, to deal in rice, is probable. That, if they must have gained by the scarcity, is certain. But there is no reason for thinking that they either produced or aggravated an evil which physical cause sufficiently explain. The outcry which was raised against them on this occasion was, we suspect, as absurd as the imputations which, in times of death at home, were once thrown by statesmen and judges, and are still thrown by two or three old women, on the corn factors. It was, however, so loud and so general that it appears to have imposed even on unintellectual raised so high above vulgar prejudices as that of Adam Smith. What was still more extraordinary, these unhappy events greatly increased the unpopularity of Lord Clive. He had been some years in England when the famine took place. None of his acts had the smallest tendency to produce such a calamity. If the servants of the Company had traded in rice, they had dc ne so in direct contravention of the rule which he had laid down i, and, while in resolutely enforced. But in the eyes of his countrymen, he was as we had said, the Nabob, the Anglo-Indian character personified; and while he was building and planting in Survey, he was held responsible for all the effects of dry season in Bengal.

Precis

Mal-administration During Famine in Bengal

The administrative machinery of Bengal had become very much inoperative in due course. This resulted in the revival of malpractices which Clive had brought to an end. There was a drought which caused a severe famine on which account millions died of hunger. Public in England held the East India Company responsible for such a state of affairs. The officials of the Company were charged with having sold rice at very high prices. People were so much against the administration that they even ignored some of natural causes which were responsible for crop failure. Clive became notorious due to these events and he was held personally responsible for the famine in Bengal.