REPARATION REQUIRED FROM MR. BOYS 417 Village. 8 persons. Rs. 90-12-0; deficiency Rs. Kasrawan. Behta Sidhai. 6 99-4-0 or 9 per cent. Rs.50-5-6; deficiency Rs.31-6-6 or 24 per cent. Rs. 57-7-6; surplus of Rs. 3; wife servant in Thakur's family. Rs. 28-8-0; deficiency Rs. 26 or nearly 50 per cent. Rs.35-12-0; deficiency 12 annas. Rs. 97-2-0; deficiency Rs. 48-6 or 33 per cent. Rs. 38-14-0; deficiency Rs. 19-6-0 or about 30 per cent. Rs. 106-5-6; deficiency Rs.84-14-10, or nearly 50 per cent. Rs. 250 in debt; contemplates flight. Rs.119-2-0; deficiency Rs. 43-10-0 or about 24 per cent. It is of the above record-that and none other-that the officiating Commissioner writes with such optimism as to the individual getting enough to eat, as to the amount available for food being' ample for a working man.' Mr. Boys retired in 1889. Being a pensioner he is still probably living. If he be I trust he will see these lines. and, in his luxurious retirement, will reconsider his expressions of nineteen years ago, and do something to repair the wrong he then did to the people out of whose necessities his retirement allowance comes. To keep him in England India has to contribute the annual incomes of considerably over one thousand Indian people. The wrong done by Mr. Boys was gross. Taking one of the cheapest grains as standard, and leaving out of account altogether very young children, though even in India little children cost something per annum to maintain, this is the result: Twenty households: Three with surplus Rs.14 4 0, Rs.50, and Rs.67 4 0. = This would mean an average deficiency in each of the twenty households of Rs.24 (£1 12s.), and, if the seventeen households only be regarded, in each of them, a deficiency of Rs.31 6a. (£2 1s. 10d.). The habit is inveterate with the Indian official and his prototype in the India Office: except when he wishes to show that Indian taxation, land taxation especially, is absurdly light per capita, he never takes the trouble to ascertain how the main facts fit in with the actual situation of the particular year with which he is dealing. From the first, all through the years since we assumed authority in India, this has been our practice. Nowhere in at least two hundred Indian Blue Books, dating from 1760 to 1901, which have been the object of my study for this book during the year in which it is written, can I, anywhere, find an honest grappling with existing statistics and their application to the condition of Ram Singh, or Hari Gour, or Cundy Pershotum, or Ahmed Khan, or Ramaswamy. There is a slight approximation to this desideratum in Sir Auckland Colvin's comments on the inquiry of 1888, but only a slight approximation; His Honor carefully avoids working out the figures according to reconsidered food prices. I forbear inquiry into or THE TERRIBLY THIN' DIVIDING LINE 419 comment upon the remarkable and significant psychological fact to which the circumstance bears strange testimony. To resume the '88 investigation in the North-Western Provinces, now, happily, the reader will probably think, nearing a close. Mr. A. H. Harrington, Officiating Commissioner, Fyzabad Division, contributes a report which calls for quotation in full. It is addressed to the Director of Land Records and Agriculture, North-Western Provinces and Oudh, and is dated Fyzabad, April 4, 1888, and is as follows (pp. 171-2): 538 1-16 SIR,-As directed in Government (Revenue Department), Scarcity dated 12th January, I have the honour to forward the report and opinion submitted by Colonel Noble. I have asked Major Anson to forward his reply as soon as possible; but it has not yet been received. 2. Colonel Noble's report is interesting, but I think it somewhat too optimistic. From the fact that in the months of January and February, 58 families in 17 villages, consisting of the poorest inhabitants of those villages, are found to have a sufficient foodsupply, it is hardly safe to infer that in no part of the Gonda district do the poorest agriculturists or labourers suffer from a daily insufficiency of food. many other districts. Gonda article ('Oudh 3. Gonda is undoubtedly better off than As remarked by Mr. W. C. Benett in the Gazetteer,' vol. i. p. 515): There can be no doubt that the thinness of the population, the extent of fertile waste, and the extreme lightness of the summary settlement, have combined to give this district an almost complete freedom from the worst forms of poverty. Beggars are rare in the south, and almost unknown in the north.' But, on the same page, the same authority remarks: 'It is not till he has gone into these subjects in detail that a man can fully appreciate how terribly thin the line is which divides large masses of people from absolute nakedness and starvation.' I believe that this remark is true of every district in Oudh, the differences between them consisting in the greater or smaller extent of the always large proportion which is permanently in this depressed and dangerous condition. 4. I cite one or two facts in support of this view. Bahriach, a district of my division, like Gonda, is one of the comparatively well-to-do districts. Yet, even there, 'there are very many under 6 fed and meagre creatures, no doubt; but the proportion of such is not so large as elsewhere. Perhaps high rents have not had time to produce any noxious effect' ('Oudh Gazetteer,' vol. i. p. 149). At present the only motive for entering into the sewak (contract) is want of food, and that this is an increasing motive is shown by the increasing number of sewaks (bond-slaves). Every second man met with in the plains of Hissampur is a sewak. . . As every sewak is a bankrupt, and as the sewaks form a large proportion of the whole, it may be gathered that the agricultural classes are deeply embarrassed. That their condition is becoming worse receives support from the fact that a caste formerly exempt from this servitude is now subject to it-that of the Ahirs' (Ibid. pp. 147, 148). In the introduction to the 'Oudh Gazetteer,' Mr. Benett, an observer wholly free from pessimism, says of the lowest castes in Oudh that 'the lowest depths of misery and degradation is reached by the Koris and Chamars;' and he describes them as always on the verge of starvation.' Now the Chamars and Koris are eleven per cent., or rather more than one-tenth, of the entire population of Oudh, [i.e., nearly one and a half millions.] 6 Lastly, I quote the following passage from some papers contributed by me to the Pioneer under the head of "Oudh Affairs," in 1876. 'It has been calculated that about 60 per cent. of the entire native population' . . . are sunk in such abject poverty that unless the small earnings of child labour are added to the small general stock by which the family is kept alive, some members of the family would starve. With the bulk of them education would be synonymous with starvation.' And I cited the following passage from the Oudh Education Report for 1874 : 'Mr. Thompson, the Inspector of the Eastern Circle, whose thorough acquaintance with the wants and condition of the people within his own circle is well known, showed in the report for 1872–73 that a labourer in Oudh by sending his son to school would incur a loss of thirty per cent. of his income; not thirty per cent. which could otherwise be saved, but thirty per cent. of what is necessary to preserve himself, children, and aged relatives from perishing by hunger. As long as their condition remains so abjectly poor as it is, the only means on which a child could be sent to school would be that it should receive a meal a day from the Government.' 5. On the question, then, whether the impression that the greater proportion of the people of India suffer from a daily insufficiency of food is wholly untrue, or partially true,' I would reply that the observations already on record in Settlement reports and Gazetteers are likely to furnish much more reliable information than I That is to say, nearly eight millions out of thirteen millions. ECONOMIC REFORM IN RURAL INDIA 421 isolated inquiries here and there of a few selected, and for the most part overworked, officers. My own belief, after a good deal of study of the closely-connected question of agricultural indebtedness (vide my five chapters on Economic Reform in Rural India in the Calcutta Review, 1882–85), is that the impression is perfectly true as regards a varying, but always considerable, part of the year in the greater part of India. 6. As to the extent of the evil, this proportion, whatever it is, will be found in that one-fifth of the total population of India which comprises the classes most liable to famine, the labourers, weavers, beggars, and potters,' amounting in number to about thirteen millions of adult males, or a population of nearly forty millions, including women and children, or twenty per cent. of the total population of British India' (Famine Commission Report, part 2, section vi., paragraph II.). Of this one-fifth (20 per cent.) I do not think that it would be an over-estimate to calculate that at least one-fourth, or five per cent., of the total population suffer from a chronic insufficiency of food, and that another five per cent. just get enough food, and no more. It will be understood that I am not now referring to the quality, but only the quantity, of the food. 7. To the question how far any remedial measures can be suggested, I can only urge the vigorous adoption of that policy of maintaining agricultural operations at the highest attainable standard of efficiency' which, as long ago as December, 1881, the Government of India recognised as an object of paramount importance. In the extract from the Resolutions appended to the Government letter under reply, the Government of India recognised it to be 'an imperative duty to ascertain whether any legitimate means can be provided to check the degradation of agriculture which is caused by rack-renting, or any unsuitable system of collecting rent, inability to obtain capital on reasonable terms,' or the lack of irrigating machinery and agricultural implements.' And it pronounced that 'the relief or prevention of such deterioration is an object which should have prominence in the work of every provincial Agricultural Department.' 8. Up to this date this declaration of policy remains a dead letter as regards facilitating the supply of capital on reasonable terms, and the protection, repair, and extension, of wells, tanks, embankments, or other works of land improvement other than canals. It will continue to be a dead letter as long as these questions remain as at present at the unfruitful stage of fitful discussions inside the Government offices between a Secretary here and a Member of Council there, and as long as the necessary step is deferred of appointing strong Commissions to review the data and experience already gained, to make such further inquiry as may be necessary, and to map out a line of action. |