In major respects, however, British rule in India brought disaster for the population. The intensive land taxes levied by the Raj, and collected with considerably greater efficiency than their equivalents had been under the Mughals, caused changes in land use and turned bad harvests into famines, with two million people dying of starvation in northern India in 1860–1, six million across India in the 1870s, and another five million with a monsoon failure in 1896–7, when the situation was made worse by an outbreak of plague.
