malaria epidemic, and the Quit India movement targeting road and rail communication. Throughout this period, transportation of civil supplies was compromised by the railways' increased military obligations, and the dismantling of tracks carried out in areas of eastern Bengal in 1942 to hamper a potential Japanese invasion. The fall of Rangoon in March 1942 cut off the import of Burmese rice into India and Ceylon. Due in part to increases in local populations, prices for rice were already 69% higher in September 1941 than in August 1939. The loss of Burmese imports led to further increased demand on the rice-producing regions. This, according to the Famine Commission, was in a market in which the "progress of the war made sellers who could afford to wait reluctant to sell". The loss of imports from Burma provoked an aggressive scramble for rice across India, which sparked a dramatic and unprecedented surge in demand-pull price inflation in Bengal and other rice producing regions of India. Across India and particularly in Bengal, this caused a "derangement" of the rice markets. Particularly in Bengal, the price effect of the loss of Burmese rice was vastly disproportionate to the relatively modest size of the loss in terms of total consumption. Despite this, Bengal continued to export rice to Ceylon for months afterwards, even as the beginning of a food crisis began to become apparent. All this, together with transport problems created by the government's "boat denial" policy, were the direct causes of inter-provincial trade barriers on the movement of food grains, and contributed to a series of failed government policies that further exacerbated the food crisis. 1942–1945: Military build-up, inflation, and displacement The fall of Burma brought Bengal close to the war front; its impact fell more strongly on Bengal than elsewhere in India. Major urban areas, especially Calcutta, drew increasing numbers of workers into military industries and troops from many nations. Unskilled labourers from Bengal and nearby provinces were employed by military contractors, particularly for the construction of American and British airfields. Hundreds of thousands of American, British, Indian, and Chinese troops arrived in the province, straining domestic supplies and leading to scarcities across wide ranges of daily necessities. The general inflationary pressures of a war-time economy caused prices to rise rapidly across the entire spectrum of goods and services. Economist Utsa Patnaik writes of John Maynard Keynes's deliberately inflationary policies, designed to reduce the