When the Bellary–Hubli Railway was taken up as a famine-relief work in 1877, its immediate purpose was starkly practical. The Deccan and parts of the Madras Presidency were in the grip of a devastating famine, agricultural employment had collapsed and hundreds of thousands of people were dependent on relief. Railway construction offered the colonial government a means of providing subsistence to able-bodied people while, at the same time, creating a permanent public asset.
But the social history of the Bellary–Hubli Railway did not end when the famine ended.
Over the following two decades, the railway became part of a much larger transformation of the region. It connected agricultural producers to distant markets, encouraged the growth of Hubli, created permanent industrial employment and eventually helped turn the town into one of the important railway and industrial centres of the Deccan.
The story of the Bellary–Hubli Railway is therefore not merely the story of a railway built during a famine. It is the story of how a famine-relief project became part of the making of a new railway society.
A railway born in famine
The origins of the Bellary–Hubli railway lay in the extraordinary crisis of 1876–78. Large parts of the Deccan and southern India had suffered successive failures of the monsoon, producing a catastrophic collapse of agricultural production.
Bellary was among the worst affected districts. By early 1877, the Government was searching for large public works on which famine-stricken people could be employed. Railway construction appeared particularly attractive — unlike purely temporary relief expenditure, railway earthworks could provide employment immediately while leaving behind a permanent communication network. The Bellary–Hubli line consequently became one of the major railway relief works of the period.
The labour employed on it did not necessarily come from villages along the alignment itself. Contemporary famine correspondence shows labour being moved between famine districts and major public works — people from Bellary, Cuddapah, Kurnool and Nellore were directed towards large works including the Bellary–Hubli railway. The railway was therefore part of a much larger geography of famine relief. A famine victim could move from an agricultural village to a relief centre, from there to a railway worksite, and potentially from one public work to another — the colonial administration was, in effect, attempting to manage a highly mobile population whose traditional sources of livelihood had collapsed.
The railway as relief work
The distinction between ordinary employment and famine employment matters. The objective of famine relief was not to reproduce the income a worker might have earned in a normal agricultural year — it was primarily to provide enough support to prevent starvation while encouraging able-bodied people to work.
This philosophy produced a highly regimented system of relief labour. Workers were organised into gangs, assigned tasks and paid according to prescribed rates; food supply, wages, supervision and the physical capacity of the workers were all matters of administrative concern. The railway worksite was therefore more than a construction site — it was also a relief institution, bringing a new form of discipline into the famine landscape. A person who had previously worked according to the agricultural cycle now worked according to the timetable and task requirements of a public works department.
The Government’s decisions reveal how closely different relief works were connected. In April and May 1877, officials were considering the movement of famine labour between the East Coast Canal and the Bellary–Hubli railway; migration from Bellary towards the canal was eventually discontinued because the railway was expected to absorb the available labour. The railway was becoming a destination within the Government’s system for distributing famine labour.
The human geography of famine
It is tempting to imagine the famine railway as being built by a stable population of local labourers. The evidence suggests a more complicated picture.
The famine had disrupted entire communities, not merely agricultural labourers — cultivators, artisans, weavers and other occupational groups could be pushed into migration or dependence on relief. Contemporary missionary accounts, for example, record the distress of weaving communities in the Bellary–Hubli region: families that had previously maintained themselves through traditional occupations found themselves impoverished by the collapse of economic activity. Some entered relief employment. Others migrated. Some eventually returned to their traditional occupations.
This matters because it reminds us that the people encountered on famine works were not simply an anonymous mass of labourers. They came from communities with occupations, skills, families and established social relationships — relationships the famine temporarily disrupted, and which the railway became one of the institutions through which displaced people attempted to survive.
When relief became infrastructure
The famine eventually receded, but the railway remained. This was the fundamental difference between railway relief and many other forms of famine expenditure. A road or tank built as a relief work could remain useful locally, but a railway formed part of a much larger network.
The Bellary–Hubli railway was taken up again as part of the expanding Southern Mahratta Railway system. Government resumed construction in 1881, and the line subsequently became part of the permanent railway network — marking the beginning of the famine railway’s second life. During the famine, the railway had provided temporary employment. After the famine, the railway itself became an employer.
The making of a railway workforce
The establishment of the Southern Mahratta Railway workshop at Hubli in 1885 was a decisive moment. A railway could not operate merely with track and locomotives — it required an entire industrial workforce: mechanics, fitters, carpenters, blacksmiths, wagon workers, clerks, stores personnel, supervisors and many categories of supporting labour. The Hubli workshop introduced a new form of employment into a town that already possessed an important commercial and manufacturing economy.
This distinction is worth holding onto. The railway did not create skilled labour in Hubli from nothing — the town and surrounding region already possessed artisans and manufacturers, including a substantial weaving community. What the railway did was place many existing practical skills within a new industrial organisation. A craftsman who had once worked independently or within a small workshop now encountered an economy in which technical skill could be applied to locomotives, carriages and wagons. The transformation was therefore not simply from “unskilled” to “skilled” labour, but from traditional and dispersed forms of production towards increasingly organised industrial employment.
From artisan town to railway town
Hubli was already an important commercial centre before the railway arrived — the 1881 Census described it as a significant commercial and manufacturing town, noting its association with the surrounding cotton-producing region. The railway did not create Hubli’s economic importance from scratch; it accelerated an existing process and redirected it.
Cotton grown in the surrounding countryside could increasingly move towards railway-connected markets. The railway altered the old geography of trade, reducing dependence on long-distance bullock-cart transport towards the Kanara coast and strengthening Hubli’s connection with the wider commercial system leading towards Bombay — a powerful combination of agricultural hinterland, railway, market town and distant commercial market. Hubli was ideally positioned to benefit from it.
The changing fortunes of Hubli and Dharwar
The demographic record makes the transformation visible. Hubli had about 36,700 inhabitants in 1881; by 1891 its population had risen to more than 52,000, and by 1901 it had reached approximately 60,000. Dharwar, by contrast, grew much more slowly.
This divergence is significant because Dharwar had traditionally been an important administrative and commercial centre — the railway increasingly shifted commercial and industrial activity towards Hubli instead. The railway station became a centre of exchange; goods moved through the town; merchants, transport workers and artisans found new opportunities; and, most importantly, the railway workshop created a permanent industrial employer. Hubli was gradually becoming more than a market town. It was becoming a railway town.
The railway and the cotton economy
The transformation of Hubli cannot be separated from the cotton economy. The surrounding region was an important producer of cotton, including the variety known as Dharwar-American cotton. Before the railway, moving agricultural produce over long distances was expensive and slow; railway connectivity altered that calculation, and cotton could increasingly move from the producing region towards railway junctions and then to larger markets.
This generated several layers of economic activity: the cultivator produced the cotton, the trader purchased it, the railway transported it, the merchant in the larger market sold it — and Hubli increasingly served as the connecting node between these different worlds. The railway workshop was therefore only one part of a wider railway economy.
A new urban labour market
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the transformation was unmistakable. A 1907 description of Hubli records a substantial industrial workforce, with the Southern Mahratta Railway workshops employing an extraordinarily large proportion of the town’s industrial workers; cotton mills and other industries provided additional employment. The railway had become one of the principal institutions shaping the city’s labour market.
This represented a profound change from the world of 1877. During the famine, employment on the railway meant survival. A generation later, railway employment could mean a regular industrial occupation.
The two forms of labour should not be confused. We do not yet possess evidence showing that the same individuals who worked as famine labourers on the Bellary–Hubli construction subsequently became workshop employees. But there is a clear institutional continuity: the famine created the immediate circumstances in which the railway was built; the railway then remained behind as permanent infrastructure, generating an expanding demand for labour. The transformation runs, in sequence: famine relief → railway construction → permanent railway → workshop employment → urban industrialisation.
Not all change meant prosperity
The railway’s social consequences were not uniformly beneficial. The same commercial integration that opened new markets also placed traditional producers under new pressures. Handloom weaving, for example, increasingly became concentrated in urban centres such as Hubli, with weavers progressively drawn into commercial systems in which merchants and jobbers supplied yarn and controlled the sale of finished cloth.
The railway therefore connected producers to larger markets, but it also exposed them more directly to competition and commercial dependence — an important qualification to the conventional story of the railway as a straightforward engine of progress. Railways could create opportunities while simultaneously weakening older forms of economic independence.
From famine population to railway society
Seen over a longer period, the Bellary–Hubli railway produced three distinct social phases.
1877 — the railway as relief. A famine-stricken population was mobilised into organised railway labour. The immediate objective was subsistence, while the Government sought to convert relief expenditure into useful infrastructure.
1880s–1890s — the railway as employment. The railway became permanent. The Hubli workshop introduced continuing demand for skilled and semi-skilled labour and created new occupational possibilities.
Around 1900 and after — the railway as urban institution. Hubli emerged as an important railway junction, commercial centre and industrial town, with railway employment, cotton trade and urban growth increasingly interconnected.
The significance of the famine railway therefore lies not only in what it did during the famine. Its deeper significance lies in what remained after the famine.
A different kind of railway history
The history of Indian railways is often written through lines, bridges, locomotives, contracts and engineering achievements. The Bellary–Hubli railway invites us to look at the railway from another direction.
Its first passengers were not the most important people in its history. Its first great social constituency was a population struggling to survive — built by people whose normal livelihoods had been disrupted by famine, before it went on to become part of a system that changed where people worked, where goods were sold and which towns prospered.
We should nevertheless resist the temptation to draw a direct line between the individual famine labourer of 1877 and the skilled railway worker of 1900 — the evidence does not allow us to make that claim. What we can say is more interesting: the famine created the conditions in which the railway acquired an extraordinary social role, and the railway then outlived the crisis that had justified its construction, becoming one of the institutions through which the region reorganised itself.
The Bellary–Hubli Railway thus offers a powerful example of how a famine railway could evolve from an instrument of relief into an agent of social and economic transformation.
The story began with hunger. It ended, at least in part, with the making of a railway-industrial society.
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References and Further Reading
- Clarke, Henry Wilberforce, Report on the Railway Famine-Traffic in the Presidencies of Madras and Bombay and the Province of Mysore in 1876–78 (Calcutta, 1880). The principal contemporary source on the movement of food, famine traffic, relief labour and railway operations during the famine.
- Southern Mahratta Railway historical records, including extracts from the Administration Reports of the Southern Mahratta Railway and Government correspondence concerning famine relief and railway construction.
- Government of Madras, Administration Reports and famine correspondence, 1876–78. Particularly useful for understanding the organisation and movement of famine labour.
- Census of India, 1881, Bombay and Madras Presidency volumes. Useful for demographic and occupational conditions in Hubli, Dharwar and Bellary after the famine.
- Imperial Gazetteer of India, entries on Bellary, Dharwar and Hubli. Useful for the later economic and demographic development of the region.
- Sweeney, Stuart. Work on railway finance and famine protection in colonial India, useful for placing the Southern Mahratta Railway within the broader debate over railways and famine policy.
- Mishra, Prashant Kumar, Tracks of Necessity: Railways, Famine and Empire in the Deccan (2026). A recent study, written from the perspective of a Indian Railways General Manager, useful for understanding the wider relationship between famine, railway construction and imperial policy.
- Contemporary missionary reports, including the Basel Mission reports, which provide valuable evidence on the experiences of artisans, weavers and displaced families during and immediately after the famine.
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