Infrastructure as a wartime logistics question

The Bengal famine is linked to Japanese wartime disruption and India's dependence on vulnerable coastal movement. A stronger railway crossing India, built thirty or forty years earlier, could have provided an inland alternative, although cheap coastal trade had weakened the incentive to fund it. This wartime catastrophe is distinguished from earlier famines for which responsibility is assigned directly to the British East India Company. Strategic logistics and humanitarian resilience depend on infrastructure choices made long before a war begins, while explanation must not erase responsibility.