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INDIA

the crops called “rabi” are cultivated, which depend
chiefly upon the short winter rains for their proper
development. Wheat is the cereal mostly cultivated in all
Northern India during the cold weather. More than half
(60 per cent.) of the crop-producing areas of the Punjab
and United Provinces are taken up with the growth of
wheat. With barley and millets 97 per cent. of the soil
of the United Provinces is absorbed, Wheat exportation
from the Punjab is already the chief feature of Punjab
trade with England, the Punjab growing twice as much
wheat as Great Britain, and equalling the total of the
United States of America. But wheat is also largely
grown in other parts of India, where the climate is favourable.
 It is much cultivated in Central India, the Central
Provinces, parts of the Dekkan, and in Bombay, and there
has quite recently been an extraordinary development in
wheat cultivation in the highlands of the Shan states east
of Burma. Wheat and barley are mostly consumed by
the wealthy classes in India, the poorer agriculturists subsisting
 on millets, which form the real staple of the
country. What is usually known as “ata” in India
is the flour of any of these grains. It is made up into
thin unleavened cakes called « chupattis,” and eaten with
a variety of condiments by the mass of the population of
Northern and Central India. Probably three-fourths of
the entire population of India live on the grain of millets,
either Joar (Sorghum vulgare) or Bajra (Pennisetum
typhotdeum) or various kinds of pulse. Besides wheat and
barley the cold weather crops include tobacco, opium,
‘inseed, and mustard, with some of the many pulses.
In the highlands bordering India, Baluchistan, Afghan.
istan, and Kashmir, winter is a period of rest for the
agriculturist. His irrigation canals are frozen, and his
fields lie under snow. The wheat and barley crops are
much at the same point of development as they are in
England. There is litile of them to be seen above ground.
The rice “khets” (when they exist) are dry and hard,
and even the “kerbi” stalks (the straw of the millet
crops) has been gathered in for fodder for the cattle.