Licence: In copyright
Credit: India, its administration & progress / Sir John Strachey. Source: Wellcome Collection.
447/552 page 417
Licence: In copyright
Credit: India, its administration & progress / Sir John Strachey. Source: Wellcome Collection.
![More serious evils have followed in the train of the Permanent Settlement. The crowning misfortune has been the destruction or non-recognition of those rights of the masses of the agricultural population which the authors of the Settlement undoubtedly intended to preserve. “ The original intention of the framers of the Permanent Settlement ” [I am quoting from Sir George Campbell] “ was to record all rights. The Canoongoes (District Registrars) and Putwarees (Village Accountants) were to register all holdings, all transfers, all rent-rolls, and all receipts and payments; and every five years there was to be filed in the public offices a complete register of all land tenures. But the task was a difficult one; there was delay in carrying it out. English ideas of the rights of a landlord, and of the advantage of non-interference, began more and more to prevail in Bengal. The executive more and more abrogated the functions of recording rights and protecting the inferior holders, and left everything to the judicial tribunals. The putwarees fell into disuse or became the mere servants of the zemindars; the canoongoes were abolished. No record of the rights of the ryots and inferior holders was ever made, and even the quinquennial register of superior rights, which was main- tained for a time, fell into disuse. When a regular police was established, the zemindars were in practice freed from any effective responsibility for the suppression of crime, or other administrative functions. They became in every sense mere rent-receivers.” 1 The consequences of the Permanent Settlement did not become immediately prominent. At the beginning of the last century the population was far smaller, there was much waste land to be occupied, and there was little disposition or power on the part of the zemindars to disregard the old customary terms on which the land was held. But, as time went on, and population and 1 System of Land Tenures in Various Countries, published by the Cobden Club, p. 176.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b29351339_0447.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
