In 1943, Bengal, then a province of British India, suffered one of the deadliest famines of the 20th century. It happened in the middle of the Second World War, and the 2019 study below notes that refugees from Burma added to the strain on Bengal's economy.
The death toll is still debated, and honest teaching means showing the range. The government's own Famine Inquiry Commission concluded in 1945 that about 1.5 million deaths in excess of normal occurred in 1943 and the first half of 1944, and said official registers undercounted. Later scholars put the figure higher. A 2019 peer-reviewed study summarises the literature as 2 to 3 million deaths.
The myth worth skipping is that this was simply a natural disaster. That 2019 study rebuilt soil-moisture records for 1870 to 2016. It found that the 1943 famine was the only major famine in that period not linked to drought: the affected region had above-normal rain in June to September 1943. The authors call it a policy failure, pointing to the war's damage to Bengal's economy and wartime grain import restrictions, which the Inquiry Commission also cited.
Historians still argue over the exact mix of causes, and the death toll itself: the Inquiry Commission called its own registers an undercount, and later estimates differ by more than a million. $SYLLABUS doesn't settle that debate. It teaches the evidence and lets the official spin answer for itself.