The Bengal famine of 1943 was a famine in the Bengal province of British India (present-day Bangladesh, West Bengal, Odisha and eastern India) during World War II. An estimated 800,000 to 3.8 million Bengalis perished, out of a population of 60.3 million, from starvation, malaria and other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary conditions and lack of health care due to a combination of factors, including government policies, war-time disruption of food distribution, and an unusually high cyclone and flood. Millions were impoverished as the crisis overwhelmed large segments of the economy and catastrophically disrupted the social fabric. Eventually, families disintegrated; men sold their small farms and left home to look for work or to join the British Indian Army, and women and children became homeless migrants, often travelling to Calcutta or other large cities in search of organised relief. Some scholars characterise the famine as anthropogenic (man-made), asserting that wartime colonial policies exacerbated the crisis. Others argue that the famine was the result of natural causes. Bengal's economy had been predominantly agrarian, with between half and three-quarters of the rural poor subsisting in a "semi-starved condition". Stagnant agricultural productivity and a stable land base were unable to cope with a rapidly increasing population, resulting in both long-term decline in percapita availability of rice and growing numbers of the land-poor and landless labourers. A high proportion laboured beneath a chronic and spiralling cycle of debt that ended in debt bondage and the loss of their landholdings due to land grabbing. The financing of military escalation led to wartime inflation. Many workers received monetary wages rather than payment in kind with a portion of the harvest. When prices rose sharply, their wages failed to follow suit; this drop in real wages left them less able to purchase food. During the Japanese occupation of Burma, many rice imports were lost as the region's market supplies and transport systems were disrupted by British "denial policies" for rice and boats (a "scorched earth" response to the occupation). The Bengal Chamber of Commerce (composed mainly of British-owned firms), with the approval of the Government of Bengal, devised a Foodstuffs Scheme to provide preferential distribution of goods and services to workers in high-priority roles such as armed forces, war industries, civil servants and other "priority classes", to prevent them from leaving their positions. These factors were compounded by restricted access to grain: domestic sources were