India, its administration & progress / Sir John Strachey.

  • John Strachey
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: India, its administration & progress / Sir John Strachey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    457/552 page 427
    this be added the cost of transport, and cost of famine establish- ment, it will not be too much to put down the net cost of famine to Government in this single district at £1,500,000, the Govern- ment revenue being less than £50,000 per annum. The famine expenditure in this district, in one year, was more than thirty times the amount of the Government revenue, and far more than its capitalised value. ... Yet the rental of the district was no less than twelve times the amount of the Government revenue. It is not alone on famine relief that enormous sums have been expended in this part of the country. There has been also a great outlay on State railways, which, though they may facilitate the importation of grain in times of distress, can in ordinary times be of little benefit to the mass of the peasantry ; for it is evident that so long as landlords are permitted to take advantage of the local competition for land in order to enhance rents illegally, it is they, and they only, who appropriate the profits resulting from that rise in prices which attends the opening up of means of communication. Besides £200,000 expended on a temporary famine railway to Darbhanga in 1874, there has been an expendi- ture on the Tirhut State railway of £1,300,000 within the past ten years.” 1 Much, however, has been done, since the facts just quoted were described, to ameliorate the condition of the peasantry in Behar. The Tenancy Act which became law in 1885 defined the position of tenants, and this has been still further consolidated by the institution, still in progress, of a cadastral survey and record of rights. In the famine of 1897 it was found that only a small proportion of the tenantry accepted relief, and the extent of their resources surpassed the general expecta- tion ; those who were employed on relief works belonged almost entirely to the class of landless day labourers, the numbers of whom were large. Some of the zemindars of Behar are among the richest men in India. The estates of the Raja of Darbhanga, in 1 Report of the Agricultural Department in Bengal for 1886.
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