What's also interesting about the mongols and their inheritors (India's mughals especially) was how weird but effective their administration was. India knew around no global famines and very few local ones (none around the Bengal) in ~300 years of Mughal rule. In ~100 years of British rule, you had regular famines all around India, and some very harsh ones where millions of people died from hunger (which used to be more than extremely rare), including one in Bengal which never in its written history had ever suffered even a local one.

There were several great famines during the Mughal reign in India, for example, Peter Mundy, the English merchant and traveller, describes the great famine of Deccan and Gujrat. The Mughal rule was brutal. The European travellers have written about the plight of the farmers who rebelled due to excessive taxation despite the fear of punishment. The Mughals built towers of severed heads outside each village and even they were not able to quell the rebellion, such was the state of affairs. So I'd say the assumption you're making isn't true.

Famines are, with very few exceptions, politico-economic actions, often with intentional malice, rather than a complete inability to obtain enough food.

Western colonialism is a very high bar in terms of damage imo.

This subject really interesting to read, thank you for mentioning it!

Found this in case anyone is interested in reading about it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India

You’re so close to the point but not quite there.

Famines are political. They happen because one population is happy to starve another. The Mughals ruled themselves. The British stole harvests for themselves and let the local population starve.

The potato famine in Ireland is treated as some kind of unavoidable, natural event. No, the British just stole the harvest. And this continued right up until Churchill in India.

So the Mughals might’ve been effective but the big difference is they weren’t being exploited as an imperial subject.

What's the saying, the Irish famine was caused by a parasite, known as the British.

Even if you can argue the British didn't deliberately cause famine over their subjects, they almost never took active steps to alleviate them.

You need to read up on history better, especially if you are talking of a country whose history has been ravaged by holocausts of the worst variety: man-made.

Background: India has been among the most fertile and richest lands in the world, since many millenia, due to it having some of the world's biggest rivers (most of them being Himalayan rivers, as perennial icemelts, pushing out fresh alluvial soil, that's very fertile), hence India has had advanced agriculture and complex industries for thousands of years.

3 regions of India are among the most fertile (due to the geography and climate): the Deccan, Bengal and South region (sizeable chunk of it used to be called as Madras during British Raj in India). Please note this, as it is important context of what I'm explaining next.

India gets 2 monsoons and also the Westerlies winds, so it gets a lot of seasonal rainfall. (e.g., Chirrapunji in India was the world's wettest place for centuries, till climate change in modern era changed the wettest wetspot to nearby locations.)

In fact, before the Persian & Turkish invaders (whose descendants called themselves Mughals, as a link to their supposedly Mongol heritage) and European (including British) invaders invaded India, it was India that was the richest land in the world and a global economic superpower, contributing to 25-30% of the entire world's GDP. e.g, Surat was the richest city in the world.

So such immense wealth and fertile lands, and lots of women, attracted the worst kind of invaders from across the hot deserts and the cold seas.

The Muslim invaders (Persians/Turks) invaded and destroyed the world's oldest universities in Nalanda and Takshashila in India. They and the colonial Whites who followed, aggressively raped and pillaged at will, and enslaved the native people, brutally (this lead to further societal problems such as Purdah (veil) system and Sati system (where the native Hindu women would immolate themselves in funeral pure as mass suicide, as the invading barbaric Mughals would rape even dead bodies)).

So atrocious was the barbarism and brutality of these invaders, that tens of millions of Indians died in artificial famines and inhuman tortures.

An entire mountain range begot an evil name - Hindu Kush (the Killer of Hindus) - so called because of the tens of thousands of Hindus (and other natives) who died on its treacherous icy slopes, as part of chain gangs of captured slaves dragged to be sold in Persian and Arabia as slaves, sex slaves or worse (e.g., little children chained to camels for races, many of them died due to injuries,starvation, exhaustion, or sheer terror). Now mention of all these evils is important because that historic information destroys the fallacy that Turk/Persian/Mughal or European/British rule in India were benevolent and just. The reality was that India was turned into living hell.

Within few hundred years of Persian/Turk/Mughal rule and European+British rule in India, those captured regions of India had become impoverished and wrecked by artificial famines induced by deliberate crippling of local industries and agriculture by systematic dismantling of those industries and agriculture and debilitating taxes (jizya, etc.).

India went from being a global industrial & economic superpower, to becoming a poor crippled enslaved nation.

Prior to the pre-medieval era, Indians knew how to deal with natural famines, because the monsoons could fail or be erratic once in a few years (drought years).

One of the earliest treatises on famine relief goes back more than 2,000 years. This treatise is commonly attributed to Kautilya who was also known as Vishnugupta (Chanakya), who recommended that a good king should build new forts and water-works and share his provisions with the people, or entrust the country to another king. Historically, Indian rulers have employed several methods of famine relief. Some of these were direct, such as initiating free distribution of food grains and throwing open grain stores and kitchens to the people. Other measures were monetary policies such as remission of revenue, remission of taxes, an increase of pay to soldiers, and payment of advances. Yet other measures included the construction of public works, canals, and embankments, and sinking wells. Migration was encouraged. Kautilya advocated raiding the provisions of the rich in times of famine to "thin them by exacting excess revenue". Famines preserved only in oral tradition are the Dvadasavarsha Panjam (Twelve-year Famine) of south India and the Durga Devi Famine of the Deccan from 1396 to 1407.The Vanjari story of the great Durgadevi famine, which lasted from 1396 to 1407, is that it was named from Durga a Lad Vanjari woman, who had amassed great wealth and owned a million pack bullocks, which she used in bringing grain from Nepal, Burmah, and China. She distributed the grain among the starving people and gained the honourable title of 'Mother of the World', Jagachi Mata.

But under the Muslim and Christian regimes in medieval India, tens of millions of Indians starved to death on the streets in these artificial famines. Or they became cannibals and robbers. Or they perished in epidemics caused by forced migrations and unsanitary conditions (because the invaders didn't bother to improve civic infrastructure, sanitation, etc.). e.g., Bubonic plague was unleashed in India, due to infected rats that came in European/British ships, and millions of Indians died in such plagues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India

But why should a fertile land struggle due to few seasons of lack of rains?

You see, the Muslim and Christian invaders followed the "scorched Earth" policy in India and elsewhere. If they lost a battle, they would burn all local crops and destroy villages during their retreat. They captured women and children (to turn them into sex slaves or soldiers), so the local population would gradually dwindle. They forced remnant populations to migrate, and imposed harshest taxes and atrocities on those that stayed. They systematically dismantled the local industries (killed or chopped off limbs of industry experts and artisans, broke their tools of trade, destroyed their schools and books, and banned cultural and scientific education). They deliberately starved and weakened the enslaved population so they wouldn't revolt. They caused caste conflicts and wars (did you know - the word "caste" comes from Portuguese word "casts", meaning societal class). The result was that these most fertile lands in the world, were turned into unlivabke hell.

e.g., In 1630, after the monsoon had failed for two years, the Deccan famine erupted and lasted two years. Abdul Hamid Lahori’s Badshahnama recorded that starvation was so rife that “life was offered for a loaf”. Other desperate forms of survival were not unknown: “Men began to devour each other, and the flesh of a son was preferred to his love.” The English merchant Peter Mundy, travelling near Surat, confirmed that parents sold or consumed their own children, or sometimes gave them away to anyone who would feed them. Ravenous subjects accosted others walking in public to prey on them. Given these wretched circumstances, many chose migration. As Lahori recalled, “Every man whose dire sufferings did not terminate in death and who retained the power to move wandered off to the towns and villages of other [provinces].”

Drastic famines occurred under the Delhi Sultan, Muhammad bin Tughlaq (1290-1351). As described by the thirteenth century Indo-Persian historian, Ziauddin Barani (1285-1357), the primary reasons behind the emergence of famine was the imposition of immense land taxes and the exploitation of the peasants at the hands of the aristocrats.

Gujarat and Deccan Famine (1630–1632): One of the most devastating famines in pre-colonial India occurred during the Mughal era. The famine resulted from three consecutive crop failures, leading to intense hunger, disease, and displacement. Contemporary Dutch records estimate that approximately 4 million people died in Gujarat and neighbourhood (Deccan region) in the ten months ending in October 1631. The overall death toll for the region was estimated at 7.4 million by late 1631.

I will probably add more data and links here, but I think now you understand how awful and horrible those evil regimes of history were.

Modern ndia is slowly rising again, from the ashes of these centuries of devastations.

Indiais making good strides in some industries, its economy is the fastest growing economy, its UPI is the biggest most-successful payments system in the world, and Indian government is standing tall and strong against bullies and terrorists.