feed their immediate families, further protecting them from inflation. Essential workers also benefited from ration cards, a network of "cheap shops" which provided essential supplies at discounted rates, and direct, preferential allocation of supplies such as water, medical care, and antimalarial supplies. They also received subsidised food, free transportation, access to superior housing, regular wages and even "mobile cinema units catering to recreational needs". By December of that year, the total number of individuals covered (workers and their families) was approximately a million. Medical care was directed to the priority groupsparticularly the military. Public and private medical staff at all levels were transferred to military duty, while medical supplies were monopolised. Rural labourers and civilians not members of these groups received severely reduced access to food and medical care, generally available only to those who migrated to selected population centres. Otherwise, according to medical historian Sanjoy Bhattacharya, "vast areas of rural eastern India were denied any lasting state-sponsored distributive schemes". For this reason, the policy of prioritised distribution is sometimes discussed as one cause of the famine. Civil unrest The war escalated resentment and fear of the Raj among rural agriculturalists and business and industrial leaders in Greater Calcutta. The unfavourable military situation of the Allies after the fall of Burma led the US and China to urge the UK to enlist India's full cooperation in the war by negotiating a peaceful transfer of political power to an elected Indian body; this goal was also supported by the Labour Party in Britain. Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, responded to the new pressure through the Cripps' mission, broaching the post-war possibility of an autonomous political status for India in exchange for its full military support, but negotiations collapsed in early April 1942. On 8 August 1942, the Indian National Congress launched the Quit India movement as a nationwide display of nonviolent resistance. The British authorities reacted by imprisoning the Congress leaders. Without its leadership, the movement changed its character and took to sabotaging factories, bridges, telegraph and railway lines, and other government property, thereby threatening the British Raj's war enterprise. The British acted forcefully to suppress the movement, taking around 66,000 in custody (of whom just over 19,000 were still convicted under civil law or detained under the Defence of India Act in early 1944). More than 2,500 Indians were shot when police fired upon protesters, many of whom were