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 II. - Migration and the factory worker

Collection:: Economics Books

MIGRATION AND THE FACTORY WORKER. 1 Orissa, the Central Provinces, the United Provinces and Madras all contribute large quotas. The two leading areas, Bombay and the Hooghly, found ib necessary, at a very early stage of their industrial history, to recruit from distant fields. Bombay Island has the sea on one side and a narrow coastal plain flanked by high mountains on the other, and no large ex- pansion of industry would have been possible had it remained dependent. on the immediate neighbourhood. It now draws its factory labour mainly from two sources—by sea from Ratnagiri, a district to the south where pressure on the land is very great, and by land from the. Deccan districts, especially Ahmednagar, Poona and Sholapur. The increasing needs of industry and the drying up of other sources, owing to the growth of local industries, have lately strengthened the flow of labour from much more distant areas, particularly the United Provinces. The Hooghly, with more than double the demand of Bombay for factory labour, is surrounded by the heavily populated districts of Bengal, but does not draw the bulk of its factory workers from them. The Bengalis have less inclination for factory work than other Indian races; when the industries of the Hooghly were being built up, their economic position was not such as to make the terms offered by industry attractive. In recent years they, more than most Indian peoples, have been realising the possibilities which industry offers to skill, and their numbers are increasing steadily in the skilled Tanks and in the lighter types of factory labour; but in the jute mills they constitute less than a quarter of the workers. A few mills to the south of Calcutta employ Bengali labour ; but to the north of the city in most of the mills the proportion of Bengalis is small, and there are large townships of immigrants. The bulk of the jute mill labour comes from the west of Bihar and the east of the United Provinces, a tract lying from 300 to 500 miles away. Other important recruiting grounds are the equally distant districts in the north of the Madras Presidency and the east of the Central Provinces, while Orissa, which supplies labour of many kinds to Calcutta and its neighbourhood, is also repre- sented in the factories. Of the jute mills it may be said that, if a circle of 250 miles’ radius be drawn round Calcutta, the great majority of the workers come from outside that circle ; and in the other factories too, a large progortion of the labour js drawn from these outer tracts. (3) THE FACTORIES AND THE VILLAGES. Temporary Migration. We have referred to factory labour as drawn from rural areas and, as often as not, from areas at long distances from the factories. This 18 the case even when the factories are situated in or close to a great city. It is here that we strike perhaps the most fundamental difference between the Indian factory workers and the corresponding class in the West. The latter is drawn mainly from persons brought up in the towns, and partly from those who have abandoned the country for the towns. The Indian factory overatives are nearlv all miorants Rut the difference does

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