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CHAPTER XIX, 
contract or to repay the advance, while 39 persons were sentenced 
to imprisonment. At the end of 1929 the number of cases pending 
was 1,944. We were informed that, prior to the coming into force of this 
Act, breach of contract cases (which were then governed by the Work- 
men’s Breach of Contract Act) were much fewer. In a large number 
of cases, the contract of employment under the Coorg Labour Act is 
signed outside the province before officials nominated by, but not under 
the control of, the Chief Commissioner of Coorg. The striking feature 
in the working of this Act is that inmost cases the worker is not in the 
province when the case is instituted against him, and the warrant has, 
therefore, to be executed by the police of the district in which he resides. 
In Assam, as we show later, the penal contract was used to keep the 
labourer on the garden after he had arrived there, but in Coorg it has 
been used to ensure that he actually comes to the estate which has ad- 
vanced him money. The Act will expire on Ist April 1931, and we 
trust that with it will disappear from India the last vestige of the penal 
contract. The representatives of the Coorg Planters’ Association stated 
to us that they anticipated no difficulty from its abolition, but we 
were informed that in some quarters an effort is being made to press 
for its continuance. From the experience of the working of the penal 
contract in this province and its effects in other areas in the past, we 
have no hesitation in recommending that no further legislation of this 
type should be countenanced. 
Planting Areas of North India and their Labour Supply. 
In the North the important planting areas are in the province 
of Assam, and in Darjeeling, the Terai and the Dooars in Bengal. Ex- 
cluding cinchona, which is grown by Government in the Darjeeling dis- 
trict, the only crop is tea. A few tea plantations are also to be found in 
parts of the Kangra district of the Punjab, the Dehra Dun district of the 
United Provinces, the Chota Nagpur Division of the province of Bihar 
and Orissa, and in the Chittagong district in Bengal ; but these planta- 
tions are small, and the labour emploved on them is obtained from the 
adjoining villages. 
Darjeeling and the Terai. 
The first tea plantation in Bengal was started in the Darjeeling 
district which lies south of Sikkim, with Nepal on its western and Bhutan 
on its eastern border. It consists of two distinct tracts, namely, the ridges 
and deep valleys of the Lower Himalaya and the Terai on level country 
at their base. The latter is only about 300 feet above sea level and the 
mountains rise abruptly from the plains in spurs reaching a maximum of 
10,000 feet above sea level, the tea gardens occupying slopes from 6,000 
feet downward. The Terai, formerly overgrown with dense malarious 
jungle, has now been extensively cleared for tea cultivation. The tea 
plantations in these two areas employ about 66,000 persons. The 
climate of the higher levels is too severe for the inhabitants of 
the plains, and the plantation labourers are mostly the descendants 
of immigrants from Nepal and Sikkim who have seftled in the