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 XV. - Housing of the industrial worker

Collection:: Economics Books

274 CHAPTER. XV. . corrugated iron. With these exceptions, housing is. provided by private landlords, The general standard is low and the practice of sub-letting for profit is common and adds considerably to the degree of overcrowd- ing. Housing Schemes of Bombay Development Department. : Until there is available an adequate supply of suitable rooms let at rents within the means of the wage-earners, every effort to improve housing conditions must fail. It was to meet these requirements that, after the war, the Government of Bombay through its Development Department built 207 new concrete chawls containing over 16,000 single- roomed tenements in four different centres, a majority of the mills being within a mile of one or other of the four. The large expenditure involved makes it necessary to accept these places as a more or less permanent feature of the housing of the Bombay industrial worker, although we hope that this plan will not be copied in any future housing schemes. In the new chawls the spacing out of the blocks provides reasonable air and light requirements, and the individual rooms give a sufficiency of space. The flush-out latrines and the bathing places are such as can be fairly easily maintained in a sanitary condition, but their number is not always sufficient. All the chawls have been provided with roads, water, lighting and shops, whilst at Worli one whole floor has been converted into a market. Schools and dispensaries have also been established in each of the four chawl areas and yet these new houses provide the only accommodation in Bombay which the workers have been reluctant to use. Never more than 509, of the 16,524 rooms have been occupied since they were made available in March, 1929. This is partly due to disturbed in- dustrial conditions, but we believe that other causes are also responsible, That the lack of lighting in the chawls themselves is one of these causes is evidenced by the fact that a number of blocks in which electric light was installed were immediately occupied, and we suggest that this improve- ment be introduced throughout. Additional objections, especially appli- cable to the Worli scheme, are the lack of cheap transport to the mill areas, the inadequacy of markets and shops, defective medical facilities and the lack of police protection. If further efforts were made to correct these deficiencies, there seems to us to be every hope that the mill worker would gradually see the advantages of residing in areas where conditions are so much superior to those in the old overcrowded slums. The ¢“ Cheries °’ of Madras. Conditions in Madras, Madura, Coimbatore and other urban and industrial areas are equally unsatisfactory. In Madras City, 25,000 one- roomed dwellings shelter 150,000 persons or one-fourth of the population. The general shortage of houses is so acute that many hundreds of workers are entirely homeless and live on the streets or on the verandahs of go- downs in the vicinity of the harbour. In Madura, where a number of cotton mills are situated, conditions are specially bad. The Municipa- lity has done nothing to relieve the problem, and none of the cotton mills has provided housing accommodation with the exception of the

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