Black Hole of Calcutta Black Hole of Calcutta The Black Hole of Calcutta was a small prison or dungeon in Fort William where troops of Siraj ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, held British prisoners of war for three days on 20 June 1756. John Zephaniah Holwell, one of the British prisoners and an employee of the East India Company, said that, after the fall of Fort William, the surviving British soldiers, Anglo-Indian soldiers, and Indian civilians were imprisoned overnight in conditions so cramped that many people died from suffocation and heat exhaustion, and that 143 of 164 prisoners of war imprisoned there died. Fort
Economy of West Bengal 33% of the potato yield in 2004, despite accounting for only 7.55% of the population of India. The state's total financial debt stood at . Agriculture accounts for the largest share of the labour force. It contributed around 18.7% to the gross state domestic product (GSDP) in 2009–10. A plurality of the state's population are peasant farmers. Rice and potato are considered to be the principal food crops of West Bengal. West Bengal is the largest producer of rice in India with an annual output of around 16.1 million tonnes in FY 2015-16, and the second-largest producer of potatoes in