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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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter II. - Migration and the factory worker

Collection:: Economics Books

MIGRATION AND THE FACTORY WORKER. 13 factory employment. Even where workers live with their families in the factory areas, many of them look to some village as their home and do their best to retain contact with it. Permanent Factory Population. "The residue, who have no village ties and look upon the city as their home, are only a small percentage of the total labour force, In the most industrialised areas such as the Hooghly area and Bombay Island, this class forms a small proportion of the factory employees. Itis proportionately most numerous in such centres as Ahmedabad, Nagpur and Madras. Each of these cities has, in its cotton mills particularly, an appreciable number of employees who form part of the permanent urban population. It is worth noting that these are composed largely of classes whose interest in the land was always slight or precarious, namely, Musal- man weavers in Ahmedabad, and members of the depressed classes in all three centres. In the last two centres the owners of the most important mills have made special efforts calculated to build up a permanent population. Statistics of this permanent element are not available ; but it has been estimated as constituting in Ahmedabad 20 per cent of the working class population. Elsewhere the ficure is generally much smaller. Relations with the Country. The points we desire to emphasise at this stage are :— (1) onthe one hand, the factory population, generally speaking, is not divorced from the land, as in the West ; (2) on the other hand, it cannot be regarded as composed of a mass of agriculturalists serving a short term in industry. The relation of the workers to the villages is perhaps best - expressed by the legal conception of domicile. In so far as an analogy is helpful, the position of many Englishmen in India has essential similari- ties. For the Indian factory worker is in most cases a man who has taken up definite work in a place which he does not regard as his own (in many cases even its language is foreign to him), who cherishes the hope of returning to his country now and then and of retiring there ultim- ately. He is as a rule prepared to abandon the factory if work offering adequate opportunities becomes available in his native place or if the climate makes serious inroads on his health. The popular and, as we be- lieve, misleading conception of the short-term recruit from agriculture has arisen mainly from experience of the past, which isno longer valid. It is kept alive partly by the fact that a number of new recruits revert quickly to the village, and partly by the fact that the continuous period spent by the average worker in an individual establishment is brief. Contact with the Village. What, then, is the nature of the contact between the factories and the villages ? It will be obvious from the preceding paragraphs that it is a variable quantity ; with some the contact is close and cons- tant, with others it is slender or spasmodic. and with a few it is more an

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