 There had been proposals for a wide-ranging survey of the subject – which Risley had himself discussed this in his article, "The Study of Ethnology in India" – but the implementation of the project had been hampered by economic circumstances related principally to a series of famines, including that of 1899–1900.In the following year he became Home Secretary in India in the administration of Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, and in 1909 was temporarily a member of the governing council.His experience of administrative matters, including with regard to policing, proved to be useful to Curzon during the government's 1905 partition of Bengal along communal lines.