Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1850495947

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-233603

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India

Place of publication:: London

Publisher:: His Majesty's Stationery Off.

Year of publication:: 1931

Scope:: xviii, 580 S.; graph. Darst., Kt.

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter XIII. - Indebtedness

Collection:: Economics Books

226 CHAPTER XIII, the full amount of interest with regularity. But defaults are recorded and go to increase the liability, so that the borrowing of a trifling sum can, and not uncommonly does, lead in a few years to a permanent and heavy load of debt. In a number of cases a stage is reached when the money-lender takes from the worker the whole of his wages, paying him only sufficient for subsistence, and even puts the members of the worker’s family to work on a similar basis. The statistics which are available of the actual payments by workers are even less reliable than those of debt and liability for interest; one anna per rupee of income for those indebted is a conservative estimate of the average payment ; one month’s wages in the year is probably a more accurate guess. All these figures can vary widely from industry to industry, and from centre fo centre, and the variations in individual cases are very large. But whatever the figure, the result is almost invariable ; the indebted worker has to give all of what might otherwise be his savings to the money- lender, and these payments are not merely the surplus that would be spent on petty luxuries ; they have often to be provided by trenching on the primary needs of a healthy life. We have been impressed by the number of cases in which an industrious worker is obliged to stint himself and his family of necessities to meet interest charges without the faintest prospect of ever being able to reduce the principal. Many money-lenders take the precaution of making their dues the first charge on labour, and outside the gates of many, perhaps most, large factories on pay-day, stands the Pathan or other money-lender, awaiting his dues. In some cases the money-lender gets his dues at the source by being allowed to come to the pay-desk, but we have no reason to believe that this is a common practice. Indebtedness and Efficiency. The evil done by indebtedness is not confined to the hardship involved in the loss of money. We entirely agree with the Railway Board in their observation that the “ tyranny of debt degrades the em- ployee and impairs his efficiency ”. Indeed, we believe that debt is one of the principal obstacles to efficiency, because it destroys the incentive to effort. The indebted worker who makes an extra effort has little hope of securing a proportionate reward ; in many cases the only result may be to enrich the money-lender. Many workers, however hard they work, cannot expect to secure anything above the level of subsistence ; the “iron law ”” of wages is a reality in their case. The most powerful incentive to good work with the great majority of mankind is the prospect of securing a better livelihood : for too many Indian workers there can be no such prospect. Causes of Indebtedness. Our information goes to show that the most important single cause of borrowing is the expenditure on festivals, and particularly mar- riages. Births, deaths and other events of life may lead to the necessity for taking small loans, while periods of unemployment due to sickness, dismissal or trade stoppages have an appreciable effect. In Bombay.

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