shortage was feared. The Central Provinces prohibited the export of foodgrains outside the province two months later. Madras banned rice exports in June, followed by export bans in Bengal and its neighbouring provinces of Bihar and Orissa that July. The Famine Inquiry Commission of 1945 characterised this "critical and potentially most dangerous stage" as a key policy failure. As one deponent to the Commission put it: "Every province, every district, every [administrative division] in the east of India had become a food republic unto itself. The trade machinery for the distribution of food [between provinces] throughout the east of India was slowly strangled, and by the spring of 1943 was dead." Bengal was unable to import domestic rice; this policy helped transform market failures and food shortage into famine and widespread death. Mid-1942: Prioritised distribution The loss of Burma reinforced the strategic importance of Calcutta as the hub of heavy industry and the main supplier of armaments and textiles for the entire Asian theatre. To support its wartime mobilisation, the British Indian Government categorised the population into socioeconomic groups of "priority" and "non-priority" classes, according to their relative importance to the war effort. Members of the "priority" classes were largely composed of bhadraloks, who were upper-class or bourgeois middle-class, socially mobile, educated, urban, and sympathetic to Western values and modernisation. Protecting their interests was a major concern of both private and public relief efforts. This placed the rural poor in direct competition for scarce basic supplies with workers in public agencies, war-related industries, and in some cases even politically well-connected middle-class agriculturalists. As food prices rose and the signs of famine became apparent from July 1942, the Bengal Chamber of Commerce (composed mainly of British-owned firms) devised a Foodstuffs Scheme to provide preferential distribution of goods and services to workers in high-priority war industries, to prevent them from leaving their positions. The scheme was approved by Government of Bengal. Rice was directed away from the starving rural districts to workers in industries considered vital to the military effort – particularly in the area around Greater Calcutta. Workers in prioritised sectorsprivate and government wartime industries, military and civilian construction, paper and textile mills, engineering firms, the Indian Railways, coal mining, and government workers of various levels – were given significant advantages and benefits. Essential workers received subsidised food, and were frequently paid in part in weekly allotments of rice sufficient to