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

35° CHAPTER XIX, contract or to repay the advance, while 39 persons were sentenced to imprisonment. At the end of 1929 the number of cases pending was 1,944. We were informed that, prior to the coming into force of this Act, breach of contract cases (which were then governed by the Work- men’s Breach of Contract Act) were much fewer. In a large number of cases, the contract of employment under the Coorg Labour Act is signed outside the province before officials nominated by, but not under the control of, the Chief Commissioner of Coorg. The striking feature in the working of this Act is that inmost cases the worker is not in the province when the case is instituted against him, and the warrant has, therefore, to be executed by the police of the district in which he resides. In Assam, as we show later, the penal contract was used to keep the labourer on the garden after he had arrived there, but in Coorg it has been used to ensure that he actually comes to the estate which has ad- vanced him money. The Act will expire on Ist April 1931, and we trust that with it will disappear from India the last vestige of the penal contract. The representatives of the Coorg Planters’ Association stated to us that they anticipated no difficulty from its abolition, but we were informed that in some quarters an effort is being made to press for its continuance. From the experience of the working of the penal contract in this province and its effects in other areas in the past, we have no hesitation in recommending that no further legislation of this type should be countenanced. Planting Areas of North India and their Labour Supply. In the North the important planting areas are in the province of Assam, and in Darjeeling, the Terai and the Dooars in Bengal. Ex- cluding cinchona, which is grown by Government in the Darjeeling dis- trict, the only crop is tea. A few tea plantations are also to be found in parts of the Kangra district of the Punjab, the Dehra Dun district of the United Provinces, the Chota Nagpur Division of the province of Bihar and Orissa, and in the Chittagong district in Bengal ; but these planta- tions are small, and the labour emploved on them is obtained from the adjoining villages. Darjeeling and the Terai. The first tea plantation in Bengal was started in the Darjeeling district which lies south of Sikkim, with Nepal on its western and Bhutan on its eastern border. It consists of two distinct tracts, namely, the ridges and deep valleys of the Lower Himalaya and the Terai on level country at their base. The latter is only about 300 feet above sea level and the mountains rise abruptly from the plains in spurs reaching a maximum of 10,000 feet above sea level, the tea gardens occupying slopes from 6,000 feet downward. The Terai, formerly overgrown with dense malarious jungle, has now been extensively cleared for tea cultivation. The tea plantations in these two areas employ about 66,000 persons. The climate of the higher levels is too severe for the inhabitants of the plains, and the plantation labourers are mostly the descendants of immigrants from Nepal and Sikkim who have seftled in the

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