A Thousand Rupees for a Life

by DOUGLAS DICKINS

1

IN August, 1943, the appearance of corpses and living skeletons on the streets of Calcutta broke through the wartime censorship to shock the world. I saw that famine at close range. I traveled through Bengal when the train was besieged by destitutes at every station. With faces distraught from fear and hunger, they climbed up to carriage windows, fought for every crumb that was thrown out to them. Red-turbaned policemen halfheartedly chivvied them away.

These poor wretches were trying in desperation to get away from their villages. They had sold the paltry bits of jewelry in which Indians keep their savings; they had sold their clothes, household utensils, land, houses, even their children in some cases, and were making for Calcutta, where they hoped to find succor. Many of them found death instead.

“Ticketless travel” was the order of the day. They clambered underneath the coaches, they clung to the steps or the buffers, they climbed on the roofs. As the train proceeded with its illegal human freight, I saw to my amazement that we were traveling past miles of ripening paddy fields. Apart from the Midnapore district, still devastated by the cyclone of the previous year, Bengal looked a luxuriant land of paddy, palms, and bananas.

The price of that famine was officially estimated as 1,500,000 lives; unofficially, as twice that number. But it was not a tragedy for all of Bengal’s people. For some it was a source of fortune. This was no ordinary famine, due to the harshness of nature; it was due to the harshness of merchants and speculators, who forced up the price of rice from about 6 rupees a maund ($3.72 for 80 pounds) to the unprecedented figure of 40 rupees. The total of “unusual ” profits on the sale of rice has been estimated by the Government Commission of Inquiry at $44,800,000. In other words, for every death in the famine, some landlord, hoarder, or speculator netted a thousand rupees excess profit.

This standard of commercial morality should be borne in mind as a background to the ever present threat of famine and semi-permanent malnutrition that hangs over the luckless heads of Indians.

In 1945 the monsoon failed and the winter rains also. Much of India, especially the southern Deccan plateau, turned into a gigantic dust bowl. Cyclones tore through the rice-growing deltas of the Godavari and Kistna rivers, leaving havoc in their wake. Failure of crops was general and widespread, but especially severe in Bombay and Madras Provinces and in the State of Mysore.

The total deficiency of grain for 1946 was estimated as 6,000,000 tons. Just what these statistics mean in terms of human suffering is difficult to appreciate. But remember this. One ton of grain will feed six Indians for a year, at the rate of one pound a day each. Imagine, if you can, a daily diet of one pound of rice, wheat, maize, ragi, jowar, cholam, bajri, according to the district, and little else. Queer little dried grains, black and brown and yellow; grains which you have never seen outside of a bird cage; boiled with water into a thin gruel, or kneaded into a putty-like paste flavored perhaps with a scrap of dried pepper and eaten with the fingers from a black clay pot. This is the normal diet for millions in southern India. It is not much that the Indian asks — a daily handful of grain; yet that handful was lacking in 1946 for 36,000,000 persons.

Dr. Rajendra Prasad, the able Congress Member for Food and Agriculture in the interim Indian Government, has revealed by what a narrow margin a major catastrophe was averted — and at what cost in sacrifice and privation to India’s peasants and workers. The disgraceful scenes of Bengal’s fratricidal profit hunt were not re-enacted. The Government had learned its lesson and achieved control over crops and prices. In most Provinces and States there is now complete government monopoly procurement of the major food grains. Rationing or “controlled distribution” has been applied to 800 towns, covering a total of 150,000,000 people. It cannot be extended much further. The very size of India, its illiteracy, its poor communications, all combine to prevent universal rationing.

The basic ration of twelve ounces daily has on occasions been reduced to as little as four or five ounces of rice, with some of the balance made up in substitute grains — unpalatable and even indigestible to rice eaters. That mass starvation has been avoided may be regarded as something of an administrative and a physiological miracle. But as Dr. Prasad points out, India’s people are used to suffering; hunger has been their constant companion for so long that they are not easily frightened by the specter of crisis. Even in the black days of 1946, with rations already below the subsistence level, some people had the public spirit and courage to form “fasting clubs” in order to save part of their rations for others less fortunate than themselves.

India’s plea before the International Emergency Food Council was for 4,000,000 tons allocation towards her 6,000,000 deficiency. Because of the world shortage, the needs of other nations, the lack of shipping, and transport strikes, she actually received from all sources abroad during the whole of 1946 only 2,448,000 tons of grain, according to figures given in the British House of Commons. By government procurement within the country she secured about 4,000,000 tons to meet the rationing schemes and to bridge the gulf between areas of acute scarcity and those where a surplus could be spared. Thus, while India is grateful to the farmers of the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Australia for the substantial help they have sent her, she is proud of the fact that the major part of her deficiencies has been met through her own efforts.

Politics have overshadowed food in India lately. But the full rice bowl, rather than the ballot box, remains for the mute masses of India the symbol of emancipation. “Dilli dur ast — It’s a far cry to Delhi,” is an old Indian proverb. Whoever would rule in Delhi must somehow manage to fill that bowl.

2

INDIA was not always poor. The early European explorers were impressed with her wealth and prosperity. Now her poverty is a byword. What has happened to turn her into a vast slum? It is worth while seeking the answer to that question; otherwise India is likely to remain, instead of a primary producer, a burden on the world’s food supplies.

It is fashionable to blame the British for all that goes wrong in India, while ignoring whatever benefits they may have conferred. My task is not to defend British policies, still less to deny the ultimate responsibility of Britons for the government of India. Some well-meaning idealists dismiss India’s problems with an airy wave of the arm. “Now that India is getting freedom,” they say, “all these difficulties will disappear. If Hindus and Moslems will embrace, prosperity will descend on the peasant like manna from heaven.”

I wish these idealists could live for a time, as I have done, in an Indian village. Let them study the caste system, which denies to the outcast “untouchables” the use of a high-caste well, even when their own is dried up. Let them cope with religious customs that require a clay god in a temple to bo washed with 108 pots of milk, while babies grow up deformed with rickets. Relief supplies of milk and other foodstuffs from abroad have probably saved many lives in India during the past year; but how many of the senders realize that many a high-caste Hindu would sooner die than defile himself with food that has been touched by “untouchable” American hands?

Add to religious custom the fatalism, superstition, inertia, and ignorance of an illiterate and priest-ridden peasantry, and you have an inkling of the obstacles to be overcome. Add too a commercial morality that sees nothing -wrong in making additional profits out of starvation. Add the corruption which permeates Indian life, from the highest spheres to the lowest. To all this, add the enervating effects of the climate, which no one can realize without experience.

But the backward state of India, you may say, reflects the reluctance of Britain to spend the necessary money on raising Indians to civilized status. Undoubtedly it does. But have you ever figured out how much money and time it would take? An Englishman, Mr. John Sargent, is Adviser on Education to the Indian Government. He has formulated a scheme for universal education between the ages of six and fourteen. This, he reckons, will require 1,800,000 teachers, to instruct 52,000,000 children. Where can you conjure up 1,800,000 teachers? Actually the scheme, which has been accepted by the interim Indian Government, will take some forty years to reach fruition, and will then cost $940,000,000 a year for British India alone — a sum in excess of India’s total revenue.

India’s governmental machine creaks and groans horribly. You cannot move at atomic speed in the land of the bullock cart. Britain came to trade, conquered rivals, and stayed to rule. Today she hands the country over, and is called to account for her stewardship. The balance sheet is too complicated to give in full. But in the mirror of Bengal’s famine we can see a reflection of India’s general condition. The causes of that famine, as well as the possibilities of improving agricultural production in the future, have been thoroughly analyzed by an official Commission of Inquiry, consisting of three Indians and two Englishmen, under the chairmanship of Sir John Woodhead.

The story revealed by the Commission is a sordid one of calculated greed, corruption, and governmental ineptitude. Wartime rationing seemed so natural to us in America and Britain that it is difficult to comprehend the mentality that advocates a free-for-all grabbing of available supplies. Yet this is precisely what the Indian big businessmen of Bengal did advocate — and got. The result was that enormous profits were made; and in the words of the Commission, “profits for some meant death for others.”

3

WHO was responsible? The circumlocutory pastime of “passing the buck” has nowhere been developed to a finer art than in India. Neither the Central Government nor the Governments of the Provinces would take full responsibility for feeding the people. Food, not being a subject “reserved” to the Central Government under the dyarchic Constitution of 1919, undoubtedly falls within the jurisdiction of the Provincial Governments. Yet, in the abnormal conditions of scarcity and war, when the free market operations of the trade can no longer keep a Province supplied with food, the Central Government surely has an overriding responsibility to plan distribution as between surplus and deficit, areas, on an all-India basis. Thus the responsibility divides between Indians and British. The Provincial Government of Bengal is and was a purely Indian administration. But at the center in Delhi sits the representative of the British Crown, the Governor General or Viceroy, whose word is law, and through whom ultimate responsibility for the destinies of India devolves on the people of Britain. It cannot be said that wartime Britain had much thought to spare for India. At the Indian end, lethargy and corruption ran their disastrous course unchecked, until Lord Wavell on assuming office as Viceroy in November, 1943, ordered the Army into Bengal to distribute relief supplies direct.

If no coördinated effort was forthcoming earlier, the reason was chiefly the resistance of Provinces with a surplus to any form of rationing or price control. The Provincial Governments of the Punjab and Sind, with enormous surpluses of wheat, were quite ready to export to Bengal, provided that prices were “allowed to find their own level.” It was a case of dog eat dog. In Bengal itself, price control was reduced to a farce by the activities of speculators who withheld supplies, until the Government was forced to capitulate and restore free trade.

The results, say the Report, were “on the one hand unprecedented profiteering and the enrichment of those on the right side of the fence; on the other the rise of prices to fantastic heights and the death of perhaps one and a half million people.”

Business had reached its zenith; profit was maximized. If at the other end of the scale these profits meant death to the poor, that was just too bad, but it was no concern of the big businessmen whose interests were so well served by this Provincial Government. Did they care if their poorer brethren starved? The Commission mentions “much callousness and indifference to suffering on the part of people who were themselves in no danger of starvation.” This is too often the background to famine in India.

But why does not a rise in prices benefit the peasants? Surely they have been able to sell their produce to advantage? To some extent they have; but their marketable surplus is small. The landlord or sahukar (moneylender) takes too big a proportion of the crop; the debt-ridden peasant seldom owns his produce or his land. The actual extent of peasant indebtedness is a matter for conjecture. Official and semi-official estimates place it at $900,000,000 in 1911, $2,700,000,000 in 1930, and $4,800,000,000 in 1940 — a total which exceeds the annual value of India’s agricultural output. A slight reduction between 1942 and 1945, due to higher prices, benefited mainly the large and medium landholders. Along with the beggaring of the small peasant goes his increasing expropriation from the land. Today the proportion of landless laborers may well be half of the total peasantry.

Then perhaps India is overpopulated? An annual increase of 5,000,000 boosted her population from 338,000,000 to 388,000,000 in the ten years between 1931 and 1941. In twenty to twenty-five years she will probably have a population of 500,000,000. Some speak of the “pressure on the land” as if the prolific procreation of Indians were the cause of their troubles. It is not, even though the population has increased about 30 per cent since 1872. In the last fifty years, Britain’s population has increased by 54 per cent. Malthus is dead, and his theories have long since been disproved. We must look elsewhere than to human fertility for the cause of India’s impoverishment.

While Europe, America, and Russia have become industrialized, and are therefore able to support greatly increased populations, in India the process has been reversed. Between 1911 and 1931 the numbers employed in industry fell by nearly 13 per cent. At the outbreak of World War II, the number of workers subject to the Factories Act was about 1,500,000 — roughly as many as the beggars in India. During the war, of course, there was a big expansion of industry; nevertheless the number of workers at the end of 1945 was only 2,520,291. Even more significant is the way in which the agricultural proportions have changed. In the middle of the nineteenth century about 55 per cent of Indians depended on agriculture for their livelihood; now 74 per cent do. By comparison, in Britain 11.6, in the United States 26.3, and in France 40 per cent are so dependent.

Here we have one of the factors in India’s unbalanced economy for which British policy is directly responsible. Before its colonization by European powers, India had a thriving artisan industry in no way inferior to that of Europe. What India did not have, however, was an Industrial Revolution. When a flood of machine-made goods began to pour in during the early nineteenth century, her artisans were unable to withstand the competition; they were forced out onto the land.

The cotton industry of Lancashire in England grew out of the deliberate sacrifice of India’s craftsmen. Prohibitive import duties in Britain kept out the superb muslins and calicos of Murshidabad and Dacca (Dacca muslin was so fine that 20 yards could be pulled through a wedding ring) until such time as the power looms of Lancashire could flood the Indian market with cheap cotton piece goods. Exports of British cotton to India grew from 1,000,000 yards in 1814 to 51,000,000 yards in 1835, while Indian exports to Britain dwindled to virtually nothing. The same thing happened to other industries, until, from a balanced economy in which industry and agriculture were integrated, India was turned into a mere source of raw materials and a market for the lusty young industries of Britain.

The fact that since World War I the tables have been turned, and India has been permitted to levy discriminatory duties against British goods, does not invalidate the indictment. As far back as 1880 a Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the rising incidence of famine pointed out the necessity of industrial occupations to draw off the surplus population from the land. It is a commentary on British rule that the Famine Commission of 19451946 should have occasion to repeat this unheeded warning.

4

WHAT has Britain done to help India? Irrigation projects in the Punjab are impressive; but four fifths of India still depends on the caprices of the monsoon; 110,400,000 acres of cultivable wasteland remain — waste. Britain built railways, which materially helped to develop India, and enabled relief to be brought to famine-struck areas. Now their assets, together with the British-held debt, have been bought out by the Indian Government, so that Britain no longer draws tribute, but on the contrary owes India over $4,000,000,000. Nevertheless, individual investors in India’s railways have not done so badly. When the ordinary stockholders of the Bengal and North Western Railway Company were paid out recently in England, they got £386.11s.ld. for every £100 invested. So India has paid dearly for her vital assets.

But stockholders are few in India. Nearly 90 per cent of her people live in villages, and here we come face to face with the problem of the land and its cultivation. The land revenue system is largely the creation of the Emperor Akbar, contemporary of Queen Elizabeth. But it was adapted by the East India Company in three different ways.

Bengal and Bihar are the principal examples of the Permanent Zamindari Settlement. In 1765 Lord Clive, the victor of Plassey, secured from the Nawab of Bengal the diwani or right to administer the Province. The East India Company thus took over a complex feudal system of land tenure under which, broadly speaking, the village community was the economic unit. This conferred security on the individual because no land could be sold or alienated without the consent of the community. Land revenue was collected through the Zamindari or feudal chiefs: but they were merely tax farmers, not landowners as we understand the term. The East India Company completely undermined this system by creating transferable rights in land and by recognizing the Zamindari as absolute owners of their vast estates. In 1793 the Company made a Permanent Settlement of the land revenue, fixing the amount to be paid by the Zamindari in perpetuity. It was left to these gentry to collect from their tenants. This they did to such good effect that today the amount extracted from the peasantry has risen, through the increase in parasitic subholders, to $52,000,000, while the Bengal Government is paid only $12,000,000 a year.

Rigidity is not the only fault of the Permanent Settlement, which covers about 19 per cent of British India. It inhibits all progress because absentee landlords and rent farmers have no incentive to spend money on improvements. However much they squeeze their tenants, the Government can exact no more revenue from them. There is no subordinate revenue staff; and this fact proved a serious handicap in the Bengal famine, when it frequently happened that relief could not be brought to the villages, nor grain collected from hoarders, for lack of an administrative organization. A commission appointed in 1938 recommended the abolition of this system of land tenure. Few would mourn its passing, yet still it flourishes.

The Temporary Settlements, covering about 30 per cent of the area, enable the Government at long intervals to raise the Zamindari’s assessments, thus securing some part of the natural increase in values. The increase is of course passed on in the form of higher rents to the ultimate cultivator, who is no better off.

The remaining 51 per cent of the country is under the ryotwari system. Landlords exist here too, but the Government makes a direct assessment on the ryot (cultivator), based on his estimated crop. A network of District Commissioners, Collectors, Tahsildars, Circle Inspectors, and village Patwaris or Accountants maintain detailed records of village lands and crops. The revenue is flexible. The allpowerful “Collector” (usually an Indian) has the power of reduction or total remission of assessments in times of scarcity. The system has its faults, but the close contact between Government and village affords possibilities of reform and protection.

Land hunger is the prevailing malady of India. Microscopic holdings, fragmented anew with the passing of every generation, leave the peasant chronically underemployed. Most have from two to four months of involuntary leisure in the year. Of the 7,500,000 families dependent on agriculture in Bengal, the Famine Commission estimates that less than 2,000,000 families hold enough land to maintain themselves. The remaining 5,500,000 million families, or 25,000,000 people, rack-rented or crop-sharing, live on the bare margin of subsistence, with no reserve of strength, wealth, or health to withstand additional shortages. This picture is broadly true of India as a whole —a peasantry debilitated by malnutrition and disease, struggling to farm inadequate and heavily mortgaged small holdings with the most inefficient and outdated methods in the world.

Even granted favorable monsoons during the next few years, India’s cereal deficiency remains a serious problem. By the natural increase of population alone, the present annual deficiency of 1,500,000 tons will increase, other things being equal, to a deficiency of 7,000,000 tons by 1951. To meet the situation, Dr. Prasad has propounded a Five-Year Plan of agricultural development, which calls for an increase of 11.5 per cent in production. At last the years of laissez faire are ended, and vast schemes of irrigation, chemical and natural fertilizers, improved seeds, consolidation of fragmented holdings, cooperative farming, loans for mechanization, have been inaugurated. The cost to the Government of India during the next five years will be between 500,000,000 and 750,000,000 rupees, and an equivalent amount will need to be spent by the Provincial Governments.

5

IT is clear that there is not one “problem” of India, but many — and they are psychological as much as economic and political. Will Indians fare better than the British in tackling the Giants of Squalor, Ill Health, Corruption, and Superstition that are the real overlords of India? No one who knows India will underestimate the difficulties that face her statesmen — the vested interests of priests and mullahs, of bankers and Brahmins. But at least Indians will have the greater will and incentive to spend the necessary money to raise India to civilized status.

It is not always appreciated what strange obstacles obstruct the raising of finance in India, and thus hamstring progressive measures. In the Central Assembly the Finance Member introduced a bill to impose a small estate-duty on non-agricultural property. Sir Ziauddin Ahmed, speaking on behalf of Moslems, said that he and his coreligionists would fight this measure tooth and nail, because “Islam does not permit the State to lay hands on the property of a dead Moslem.” The exact division of Moslem estates is prescribed in the Koran.

Consider, too, the effect of Hindu religious beliefs on prospects of improving the milk output. All observers are agreed that it is essential to reduce the number of semi-starved cattle for which insufficient fodder is available. But in the eyes of Hindus there is no worse crime than to kill a cow. At the same time their inhumane and unhygienic treatment of their holy animals is such as to arouse disgust and despair in a Western mind. Not long ago the chief executive officer of the British Milk Marketing Board toured India to advise the Indian Government on the dairying industry. Here is a typical extract from his report: —

At another stable the buffaloes were allowed to immerse themselves daily in a backwater into which went all the urine from 500 animals, and into which the dead bodies of animals found their way: but no washing of udders took place before milking. An official report on a test of Bombay milk showing a bacteria count of 36 million per cubic centimeter should, in the circumstances, surprise no one.

Significantly, the report recommends that the Provincial Directors proposed for the milk industry should be appointed from overseas at salaries of $12,000 a year, because it would be hard for any Indian with a career at stake to take the drastic and unpopular action necessary to combat the filth, ignorance of hygiene, repulsive personal habits, and official apathy which are prevalent throughout India — with the sanction of religious custom.

What, then, of the future of public health in India? Almost one child in every six dies before reaching its first birthday. The expectation of life is 27. Six million a year die from preventable diseases such as malaria, cholera, plague, and smallpox. The inefficiency of the public health system is such that in rural Bengal, hospitals are “unpopular,” and people are reluctant to enter them because in many there are no night nurses or attendants, and patients are left to die at night without attention.

The word hospital connotes to us a spacious, airy building, with white tiles and running water. In India it is a little different. Listen to this extract from the Famine Commission’s report: —

The sweeper is a functionary of vital importance in Indian hospitals, performing the essential tasks delegated to him by the customs of the country. His services were of particular importance in emergency hospitals without sanitary appliances or drainage. . . .

In the early months of the famine, when many patients were suffering from diarrhoea, and beds and wards were continually befouled, the shortage of sweepers was almost as great an obstacle to the efficient running of hospitals as the shortage of doctors and nurses. The problem remained unsolved throughout the famine.

What a commentary on India! A land where several million human beings are condemned by the accident of birth to minister to the most elementary needs of their fellow men, spending their lives in the function of human drains. For it is caste that decides their occupation. Blame the British if you like for not introducing modern drainage outside the big cities; but what incentive is there to incur such expense, when the customs of the country deny the right of some millions of its citizens to any but the most menial and degrading tasks, which they in turn regard as their natural livelihood?

This point raises the old controversy on interference or non-interference with native customs. Possibly it would have been better if Britain had adopted, like the Soviet Union in its Asiatic republics, a frontal attack on all obscurantism. But with the best of intentions, British policy has been one of scrupulous abstention, save against the grossest malpractices, such as infanticide and suttee. This policy, of course, is the cheaper one. Finance is often the arbiter.

So, in the typical Bengal district of Dacca, an area of 2713 square miles, with 4,500,000 population, there is just one District Health Officer, drawing a salary of 300 to 500 rupees a month. He has under him a subordinate health staff consisting of Sanitary Inspectors on 50 to 70 rupees, plus 21 rupees allowances; Health Assistants on 22 rupees plus 7 rupees allowances; Medicine Carriers on 17 rupees a month. Can one possibly expect efficiency from such a staff? No wonder the Famine Commission uncovered a maze of neglect, sloth, indifference, and chicanery. Many of the Native States could show a better record than this.

Clearly the Indian peasant cannot afford to support a doctor in his village; in consequence doctors naturally seek private practice in the cities. The only solution is a well-paid State Medical Service to cover the 700,000 villages of India. This cannot be achieved on the present expenditure of 2 1/2 per cent of the national revenue. A Committee on Public Health under Sir Joseph Bhore has reported that per capita expenditure must be multiplied by seven times for the next five years, and by fourteen times thereafter. And this is only a beginning.

We see here the vicious circle from which India suffers. Poor because she is ignorant, she is ignorant because she is poor. Without money she cannot have health, and without health she cannot earn money. Whoever will break this circle must attack its whole periphery, at the focal points of industry, agriculture, health, education, religion, and morals. India’s statesmen are confident they can solve the problems that have defeated Britain. They now have the opportunity to try.