Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India

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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 XIX. - The planatations

Collection:: Economics Books

- = 5 A CHAPTER XIX.—THE PLANTATIONS. * “3 Co Plantation System. 3 a N We now pass from industries, properly so called, to branch of activity ‘which, while it is predominantly agricultural, has many features in common with industry. The plantation represents the development of the agricultural resources of tropical countries in accordance with the methods of Western industrialism ; it is a large scale enterprise in agri- culture. The plantation system connotes the acquisition of a limited but fairly extensive area for the cultivation of a particular crop, the actual cultivation being done under the direct supervision of a manager, who in some cases may himself be the actual proprietor. A consider- able number of persons (the number may run as high as 4,000) are employ- ed under his control in the same way as the factory workers are under the control of the factory manager, but there is one important difference in that the work is essentially agricultural and is not concentrated in a large building. Factories are to be found on certain plantations. Most tea gardens have their own factories for dealing with the harvested crop. A number of the coffee plantations in South India also have their own factories, but in them the process of manufacture is only a preliminary stage, the coffee being cured and finally prepared for export in fac- tories outside the plantations. The factories in North India are open intermittently for a little over half the year, and those in South India for the greater part of the year. In both areas they employ only a small fraction of the workers engaged on the plantation. A point which deserves notice in connection with the plantation system 1s the extent to which it is under European management. About 909, of the plantations in North India and nearly all those in Madras and Burma are controlled and managed by Europeans ; the small province of Coorg is the only area where the Indian planters are in the majority. The plantations managed by Indians in most areas are not only much by but generally smaller in size, than those managed by Europeans. Lhe cultivation of indigo was the earliest agricultural enterprise of the European in India, but the system of cultivation was not strictly iy plantation system, as generally the indigo planter did not cultivate is lands with the help of hired labour, but preferred to enter into contrac : with his own tenants and those of other landlords to sow a portion 0 their holdings with indigo. which was then sold to him at a fixed price. 349 Migration. The plantations lie mainly in forest tracts largely cleared by the planters themselves, a process still going on over large areas. As a rule the local population was extremely sparse (or even non-existent) and, mn the leading planting regions, a large supply of labour could only be secured by recruitment from distant parts of India. Thus, like the factory industries, the plantations have depended for their development on a continuous flow of labour from tracts far afield. The bulk of the planta- tion labourers, coming from other provinces and speaking & number of different languages, have to work in areas whose peoples. languages and

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