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CHAPTER VI. 
lengthy and often difficult travel which has necessarily to be concentrat- 
ed into that part of the year when the work is in full swing. Moreover, 
with the exception of tea factories, such places are mostly small and fre- 
quently owned by uneducated people whose acquaintance with the law is 
slight and whose isolation makes it easy to practise evasion. This is 
particularly true of the cotton ginning and pressing factories, where the 
situation is apt to be further complicated by the pooling system to which 
we have already referred and by the practice of short-term leases. Such 
factories are frequently leased for a few years or even for one season and 
the constant change of ownership involves constant re-education by the 
factory inspection department. There is also a tendency, in more than 
ane class of seasonal factory, to concentrate work in factories employing 
just under 20 persons in order to evade the requirements of the Facto- 
ries Act. Although this has been defeated in some provinces by the 
extension of the Act to places using power and employing between 10 and 
20 persons, the result has been an increase of work for the inspecting staffs. 
We do not consider that proper control can be exercised over the working 
of the ordinary seasonal factory unless it is inspected at least twice in every 
season. We recognise that in some cases this is an almost impossible re- 
quirement for the regular officers of the factory inspecting staffs. Apart 
from considerations of expense, regular inspectors on tour, when away 
from large centres, are well known and carefully watched and it is difficult 
for them to make unexpected visits. 
Part-time Inspectors. 
We do not contemplate that the inspection of seasonal factories 
should be made entirely or even predominantly through the agency of the 
whole-time inspection staffs, although inspection should invariably be 
carried out under their direction. We visualise the more systematic and 
systematised use of the part-time inspector. The magistrate or other 
officer who may be appointed in this capacity in any outlying district has 
ordinarily one big advantage over the full-time inspector, in that he lives 
near the factory and can reach it at any time without attracting particular 
attention. On the other hand, this type of inspector has suffered in the 
past from one important disadvantage, namely, the lack of technical 
knowledge. Nevertheless, under slightly altered conditions, such officers 
can do much valuable work and should be increasingly used. Cotton gin- 
ning factories alone now number over 2,000 and, as a result, occupy a large 
amount of the time of the full-time inspector. In one month, or even less, 
a selected magistrate or revenue officer could acquire knowledge of the 
machinery, law, registers, ete., sufficient to enable him to carry out efficient 
mspections in places of this kind. A special course of instruction, to be 
conducted by the Chief Inspector, should be held from time to time for the 
selected officers. This should include practical work on inspection. 
Thereafter, all that would be necessary would be for a full-time inspector 
to visit a proportion of such factories to check the work done, and to deal 
with questions of special difficulty. We visualise the successful applica- 
bion of this system in the case of other types of seasonal factories, e.g., rice 
mills in South India and Burma. We recommend that selected officers