Ask Lemmygrad

As someone who does deep dives into finding historical sources to confirm what is claimed in secondary sources, believe me that it's actually really hard work to turn up primary sources from the era prior to digitisation of media (as before the period where stuff like newspapers were regularly added into online archives as searchable text — say around the 70s or 80s.)

No shade on India here but because it was colonised for such a long time, it never had a chance to industrialise and develop its archiving and its historical record comprehensively while under the boot of colonialism in the same way that countries like the US or Britain have been able to, not until recently anyways, so it's probably a later era that you're looking at when it comes to newspapers being digitised.

What you'd likely need to do would be to go digging through a the major newspapers of the time in that year, likely in national archives or in the archives of major newspaper companies, in order to find the quote in question because it was likely published in the print news first and later quoted in this flyer. And I'm talking stuff which is likely scanned but never indexed or converted to searchable text. Which would be a ton of legwork to do and there's no guarantee that you'd be able to find the exact newspaper article or that the newspaper article itself has been preserved in archives. It might even require searching in hard copy archives.

I appreciate your skepticism and it's definitely an open question as to the historicity of this quote but at the same time, when you're digging this far back into history for a particular source (especially when it's across languages), it quickly become an especially arduous task to find primary sources. It's the sort of thing that you'd likely need to get in contact with a historian who specialises in the famine from the perspective of India to ask for their assistance with tbh.