The great famine and its causes — n/a

Preface

The letters published in this volume appeared originally in the Manchester Guardian. I have made a few additions and alterations, but none of any moment. No account of so vast a catastrophe, written by any one observer, can pretend to be more than a fragmentary record of impressions ; and though I suppose I saw more of the superficial extent of the famine during the eleven weeks which I spent in India than any other person, the great panorama of suffering that unrolled itself day by day was, in relation to the whole, the merest riband. May I add that the most generous help was given to me by all classes to whom I appealed, and that the advice and assistance of the British and Native members of the Civil Service — often given, I fear, at great personal inconvenience —

QlTQROft vi PREFACE

lightened my task enormously. If my conclusions as to the economic situation are not accepted by all whom it was my privilege to meet, I must console myself by expressing my deep obligations for the information and material which enabled me to arrive at any conclusions at all. The photographs in the present volume scarcely touch the ghastlier aspects of the famine.

V. N.

Contents

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I. In the Gateway of India i

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The brown lands of the Deccan, none too rich at the best of times, are fast being turned into tracts of dismal sun-cracked desert — charred earth whose friable edges are caught by the wind and sent flying in clouds of pungent dust. No water in the wells, no water in the rivers — this is the report that comes in from the districts, and you can easily test it for yourself. The Khadkalla river, in the Poona district, which I have struck on twice this week, has a few large pools left standing in its bed, watched by the beasts and ladled by the people ; the rest is dusty boulders. I found donkeys and cattle being driven along the sandy bed of the Sina river as I crossed the bridge this morning, and recrossing it later in the day I saw the women spreading their clothes to dry in the river bottom. Town and cantonment are getting their water by bullock transport. Even the engines on the. line, like the cattle, are reduced to picking up water where they can. We were stopped yesterday for supplies at a nullah near Visapur, which the railway people have been tapping. The farmers in the villages are doing their best to drive wells down to the water, and Government has been lavish in making advances to help them, but the successive droughts seem to have left the earth bone dry to a depth never known before, and little comes of the ryots' efforts. The central horror of this famine lies in the fact that the misery and torment of a water famine have to be endured together with a famine of food for people and fodder for beasts.

In ordinary famines, or even in normal times when the work on his farm grows slack, the ryot will leave his home and go off to Bombay in search of work, or he will take to bullockdriving, or try to pick up a labourer's job on the irrigated lands in the north. But this year plague and famine have shut the door in his face, and no work is to be had. The Mahratta ryot is a hardy fellow ; but what can he do when the cattle have gone to the butcher, when the last grains of the famine crop have been eaten, when the money-lender will not lend another pie, and the bucket comes empty up the well ? In the first place, he will send his wife and children to the relief works, and try if he can struggle on alone ; and probably after a time he will give that up as a hopeless job and go to join his family at the famine camp. This, I am told, is the first famine that has found the farmers in any numbers on the relief works. At some of the camps in the Poona district there are 40 per cent, of Mahrattas, most of them farmers or members of farmers' families, working and sleeping in the same camp with beggars and with mahars, who sweep the villages and eat the flesh of famine-stricken bullocks. A fair test this of the extremity of the cultivator.

The exodus from the villages has been going on ever since last year, and in spite of the action of Government in moving the works to greater distances, or where this is impracticable in drafting the villagers to camps that are far away from their homes, and notwithstanding the more stringent deterrent features of relief routine, it still goes on. During the last few days I have met scores of family parties on tramp to the works, the mother carrying the latest-born in a basket on her head and the last but one in her arms or on her back, and the father and elder children dividing the burden of family goods, which generally consist of a few pots, a bundle in a blanket, and perhaps the handmill for grinding. A woman came marching the other day into a camp in Khandesh with two babies in the basket on her head, one on each arm, and another couple clutching at her sari. It is sad to see these groups of refugees pacing the burning dust with lips and throats too parched for speech, their garments often in shreds and their eyes hollow with hunger. The Indian in these parts never seems to be sorry for himself or to look for sympathy from others. He just goes on. The bulk of the wayfarers whom I met in the Poona district did not show signs of far-

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advanced starvation. Now and again I noticed emaciated beings with legs like sticks, who stalked along, bundle on head, with a painful hitching motion of the hips, but they were the exception. The majority were distressed,

7Nf THE DECCAN exhausted, and reduced, but not beyond the point at which a few weeks' feeding, care, and rest should set them up again. My impression is that the bulk of the people have not waited for the last extremity of want, but have set off for camp precisely when there was no more food to be had at home.

But let me go back to my visits to the relief works. I made a beginning in the Poona collectorate, where the stress of famine is relatively slight, only 65,000 out of a million of people having so far come upon the works. In this district most of the people are being put to stone-breaking, and according to the figures supplied to me, not more than seven or eight thousand are employed on other tasks. My first sight of a famine camp was at Uruli, a village on the Sholapur road, sixteen miles from Poona. Here I found some hundreds of people grouped in gangs of thirty, squatting on the ground, each man, woman, and child beside a heap of broken and unbroken stones. They seemed to me to make poor hands at the work, the old women and the young children especially, though the children pounded away with abundant misdirected energy. The youngsters under eight seemed to me the most thriving set in the camp. I found them having their breakfast of half a cake of millet — not at all bad food, — which they were crumbling into small fragments and mixing with oil and highlyseasoned condiments — pepper, chili, saffron, and salt, with a groundwork of carrot — calculated to make the English infant dance with pain. Each child had a pannikin of some sort ; everything was arranged with order, and, except for the frequent bad eyes, the occasional sores, and the obvious languor with which some of the children ate their breakfast, there was nothing painful in the sight of the large breakfast party. After breakfast the children trotted off to look for shade under the few trees that were dotted about. I believe they are to have some sort of shelter before long, a piece of extravagance which seems permissible with the thermometer at 150 degrees in the sun at midday, and matting and bamboos going cheap. The babies of the camp who stay with their mothers at the stone heap are not so fortunate, and to English eyes there was something painful in seeing these infants tucked up somehow in the mother's ragged sari or cradled amongst the stones, while the sun beat upon their heads and the chips came flying from the women's hammers. One child with half its head blue with a frightful sore was ke ^ning up a dolorous howling, the mother folding one arm about it for comfort while she hammered with the other. A little way off from the clink of this Nibelung chorus, three cashiers were squatted on a carpet tossing the wages for the week on to another carpet placed in front of a group of women whose names were being called from the register.

The wages throughout the relief works are paid in money, and they are based on a hypothetical ration of so much grain, salt, vegetables, condiments, and oil, a maximum and a minimum ration being fixed, and the whole adjusted to the price of grain in the bazaar. I shall have more to say later on about the system of work and payment, but it will be seen that the scale works automatically in two important respects. It safeguards the worker against a rise in prices — the price of grain is, roughly, twice as high now as before the famine, but if it were four times as high the food equivalent would still be paid — and it imposes, in theory at least,

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3. certain check upon any tendency to shirk the allotted task. The system is not one of piecework, but of taskwork with a low minimum and a maximum — the outturn of the gang giving the measure of the individual's wages.

My visit to Uruli happened to fall on a black day, for, a week before, a circular had been issued decreeing that all gangs performing less than half the maximum task — an imaginary standard, by the way, which no single gang had accomplished during the week in question — should be paid 25 per cent, below the minimum. So that instead of ten and a half annas, the former weekly minimum, the men and women in the defaulting gangs were getting seven and a half and the working children four and a half annas. This is why the group of women at the pay carpet looked so dejected, why the people kept throwing up their arms or bending low in an attitude of petition as I picked my way between the circles of stone-breakers. " They think you have come to tell them that the wages will not be reduced," a native official explained. Whether the people can subsist on this penal allowance without ripening for cholera and other famine diseases is a grave question. The new scale, which has, I believe, been very generally adopted in the Presidency, is the result of the circular issued by Mr. Holderness on behalf of the Government of India. It has been introduced in the full belief that there exists throughout the famine districts a system of organised shirking, against which the prescribed minimum was of no avail, and which bids fair to destroy the deterrent element of the relief machinery. The cry, *' Ye are idle, ye are idle," comes from almost every English official on famine duty. To which the people reply, " Give us more food, and we will do more work ; this is our third year of famine within four years." It is an ominous fact that whilst the minimum is being cut down by a quarter — a minimum which assumes that only fifteen ounces of solid food a day will go into the stomachs of people who must work nine hours between the rising and the setting of an Indian sun — cholera is on the march in Khandesh, and God help India if cholera attacks the famine camps !

I must cut short what I have to say about the other camps in the Poona district. But concerning the works at Khadkalla, where some four thousand stone-breakers are employed, a word or two may be said which will throw light on the charges of pauperisation with which the Government of India are backing their enforcement of the penal minimum. Granting, for the sake of argument, that a large percentage of the people are skulking, what evidence have the Government for the assumption that the villagers are leaving their homes for the works without compunction, and that the old feelings of pride and independence have yielded to the attractions of free quarters and light work ? Attractions ! Take the life in camp. At three o'clock in the morning the women get up and begin to grind the grain for the midday meal. The refugees have spent the night in the open air — in Poona district no huts are provided for the rank and file, — and the morning breeze, as I can testify, blows cold from the Ghauts, cruelly cold for people whose only covering is a threadbare kambli — a word which by courtesy appears to be translated blanket. Then, perhaps, fuel has to be gathered, for it costs an anna a week to buy, or nearly a seventh of the week's wages ; and when the bundle of sticks has been collected it is liable to be seized by the officers of the Forest Department. The officials at Khadkalla told me that such seizures had happened several times. When work begins, the attractions of stone-breaking, however leisurely performed, are not obvious. The people are unused to the work, and the stones are hard and difficult to crack. I took the hammer from a little girl who was vainly trying to break a small lump of stone, but after thirty blows, directed, as I thought, with judgment, I gave it up and handed it to the ganger. It took the ganger another dozen strokes to split the stone into two or three bits, and these bits had again to be severally assailed before they would pass through the two-inch ring. But if I am wrong and the life really does attract the people, why is it they have not come before ? The famine has been going on and camps have been open in the collectorate for several months. Moreover, the famine code lays it down that the village patels or headmen " shall do their utmost to induce distressed villagers to go to relief works," and judging by appearances some of the new arrivals might well have yielded to the patel's urgency long since. If the people are so demoralised as is alleged, their delay in coming to camp is unaccountable.

Valak and Khamshet villages are close at hand, and the day before my visit to the works I went to inspect them, accompanied by an ex-official who knows the district well. A fair number of the villagers had gone on the works, but most of them I found were still resisting the temptation, preferring to struggle along on wild fruits and whatever they could pick up. Khamshet had come to the end of its beans, and was fairly cleaned out, though not before Government had secured 182 rupees as a first instalment of the land tax — a demand which made a biggish hole in the beans. Valak had paid 125 rupees, and notices for the second instalment had been served on both villages. The people whom I met at this Sunday morning durbar on the spurs of the Ghauts were not at all of the whining sort. They answered questions in a straightforward way, through their headman and accountant, and made few complaints. They allowed me to go into their houses — sheds with mud walls, thatched roofs, and grass partitions — and see all that was to be seen — a heap of cow dung for fuel and manure, two or three brass pots, a stone for rolling chili, a handmill, a quilt of rags for sleeping on, and the spare clothes of the family strung on a line. There may have been food in hiding, but I saw no traces of it in Khamshet, though in Valak a woman was working her mill, and I believe things were slightly better there. I asked about the silver ornaments, but was told that they were all pledged or sold last famine. What about the money-lender ?

Two-thirds of the lands of each village were mortgaged, and no more could be borrowed. In Valak the money-lender — a beak-nosed, shifty-looking, pink-turbaned gentleman introduced to me by the interpreter as the village creditor — was present on a visit. He had come to look for money, not to lend it, and his grievance, which he let me know before the village, was that he could not recover any part of the two hundred rupees he had lent to the villagers for grain last year. But though the people did not parade their wrongs, they let me know two things before I left the villages. The men wanted advances to enable them to prepare their fields in time for the rains, and the women, who kept in the background till we were moving off, would not let us go till the Englishman had seen the blind folk and the ancient tottering villagers and been asked to consider whether perhaps a handful of the grain which the Government allow for village relief might not be spared for them. Of their own hardships on the works and in the village they said nothing. I shall not soon forget this meeting with the villagers who pay us to govern India ; the haggard, hunted faces of the women, turned to hideousness by a life of misery ; the tottering skeletons of old men ; the blind mother with the blind child, and the other child that the two kept fingering ; the bright eyes and hardset faces of the men, and the naked children with distended stomachs and flies at the corners of their eyes ; and the bunch of red idol surveying us all through the open door of the temple, under a roof of corrugated iron from Wolverhampton. I asked the headman to tell his people that I had come from England to see them, and that the people of England were sorry for their sufferings. On reflection I admit it seems unreasonable that Khamshet and Valak should not shut their doors and hasten to the works in a body ; but the fact is that they are going in driblets, and reluctantly, and when Sunday comes round the exiles hurry back to the poor home, the burnt-up field and the red idol as fast as their feet can carry them.

Ahmednagar, 27 March.

Ill

I must pause for a moment to return to a question which I have already touched upon — a question which impresses me more and more as one of extreme urgency, and which, in the face of the outbreak of cholera, it is impossible to leave over for more mature investigation — I mean the penal minimum. But first one word as to the Famine Code. The Famine Code for the Bombay Presidency is an elaborate document with an index of twenty-four pages and minute directions concerning every department of relief. It is rigid, definite, and all-embracing — a complete system designed to foresee and overcome every emergency. I refer to the Code before coming to the question of the penal minimum in order to dispel certain illusions as to the safeguards which the document sets up against harsh and ill-considered action. I suggest to the collector or the engineer that the penal minimum is likely to bear hardly on the weak and unfit, and they refer me at once to the Code or to their instructions based upon the Code. They point out that a careful system of grading is there laid down, that new-comers go into a class where the work is easy and are moved up into another class where the work is harder, and that the unfit are set to work by themselves on an assured minimum or allowed to do nothing. All this is excellent on paper, and might be infallible in practice if the famine service did not happen to be overworked and understaffed to a degree which makes anything approaching close or constant supervision impossible. The service is short of administrators, short of engineers, short of doctors, short of medical assistants, short of material, short of tools for the workers. Every one is pegging away at top pressure in a superbly cool and cheerful fashion that neither plague, nor famine, nor cholera, nor a tropical temperature, nor all four together, seem able to perturb ; and the native officials, so far as I have been able to see, are working splendidly. But just as drill-books are apt to be forgotten in a battle, so the most beautiful of regulations may be overlooked in a famine, especially when officers are lacking. If I appear to be somewhat critical in what follows, I am certainly not criticising the men who are toiling night and day to keep the people alive. My only fear is that their faith in a system is leading them into deep waters.

Now, a very few hours on a single famine camp — and I have studied several camps before writing these lines — is enough to show that between the principles and the practice of the Code a wide margin may, and often does, exist. To take a few instances, the Code assumes — and I as a humble student of the Code assumed too — that huts were provided in all cases at the famine camps. In the Ahmednagar collectorate they are so provided ; in the Poona collectorate they are not. Then, as to fuel, the Code recommends that arrangements be made for providing the people gratis. I have not found as yet one camp where this is done. At some camps fuel is sold, at others the people are left to collect it for themselves — at their peril. A small thing, perhaps the reader will say ; but no, it is not a small thing if you are living on tenpence a week with a purchasing power of fivepence, and you find one morning that your wages are to be cut down by at least 25 per cent. Every penny, remember, represents a day's food, and if a penny is to be spent on firewood, the fact that the Code does not contemplate such expenditure does not make good the loss of a day's victuals. Again, the Code lays it down that care should be taken to see that every one has a blanket, but so far as I have been able to observe, there is a grievous lack of blankets in some of the camps, and too many of the people in camp have worn their clothes to shreds.

Even more important is the question of the price of grain, on which the wages are computed. At the present moment 16 lbs. to the rupee is a general price, and every worker is supposed to be able to go to the authorised dealer and buy at that rate. But at a camp near Poona a subordinate official volunteered the information that people there could only buy 14 lbs., and that if they bought on credit they got 1 lb. or \ lb. less. Here was a serious hitch ; and how is one to know that similar hitches do not occur

3° elsewhere ? Another discrepancy between Code and practice comes out in the payment of wages. The Code recommends that payment should be made at least as often as twice a week. But the practice is to have a single weekly payment. The results are most serious, as the people are unable to trace the relation between task and wages, and worse still, they get into the grip of the bunya, who takes the wages and gives them what he chooses. I pass by the Code provision for the suspension and remission of land revenue, as this is a matter on which I fear I shall have to write at length. But I may say here that whilst the Code provides in a specific manner for the relief of taxation in a period like the present, no attention is being paid to its instructions, and the collection of revenue is going steadily on.

These considerations have a direct bearing upon the reduction of the minimum wage by 25 per cent. If one felt assured that the Code, so to speak, enacted itself, and that the punishment was only to be meted out to proved skulkers — of whom, no doubt, there are plenty on the works — it would be one thing, though I submit a doubtful one. But I contend that there is no machinery for adequate discrimination, and that, good as the intentions of the authorities may be, it is inevitable that this penalty should fall on the wrong heads, on the evil and the good alike, and on women and children who are in no condition to bear it. Remember, for one thing, that the individual punished is one of a gang of thirty, over which he has no more control than the thirtieth part of a voice. But now let us see what the penal minimum is, and to do this we must go back to the normal minimum, laid down some years ago by the Government, and confirmed by the recent Famine Commission, in the following terms : —

"In respect to the standard to be adopted we accept without hesitation as sufficient, and not more than sufficient, the full and minimum rations laid down by the Government of India in the Provisional Code, which were based upon the suggestions of the Famine Commissioners, and were the result of much practical Indian experience and expert inquiry. The only alteration we propose is a very small addition to the extra items of the minimum ration."

I had better give the ration, the equivalent of which is, as I have pointed out, paid in money : 15 ozs. common grain, 2 ozs. pulse, \ oz. salt, J oz. ghi, or oil, J oz. condiments and vegetables, with 5 per cent, to be added for margin. Is this an excessive allowance ? Its money equivalent at present prices works out at \o\ annas a week, without taking into account the margin which has been knocked off the Bombay Code. Is that in itself other than a penal minimum ration — a ration which is bound to leave the worker hungry and reduced ? The Government has lately, in view of the high price of grain, increased the allowance to prisoners from an anna and a half to two annas and a half a day, and one would think that a minimum of some 70 per cent, below convict subsistence was not too much to allow to people who have been exhausted by years of acute privation. Let me add that it was a reduced ration on a rather more generous scale than the present penal allowance that was held accountable for the epidemics which swept off multitudes of famine workers in previous famines.

Any one can calculate for himself how the minimum given above will look with 25 per cent, knocked off, but it is enough to say that the penal wages come to annas a week for grown people in the Poona collectorate and 8f annas in works near Ahmednagar. I go back for a moment to the camp at Uruli, which with two adjacent camps began upon the penal wage the week I visited them. I went through the muster rolls with the aid of the officials, and I found that out of the whole number 180 persons were earning a weekly wage of one rupee and half an anna (between the maximum and the minimum), 900 persons were earning the minimum of \o\ annas, and 1100 were getting the penal minimum of 7§ annas. It should be explained that about a third of the recipients of the minimum and the penal minimum were children, and their wages in the case of the lowest class came to only ^\ annas for the week. Seeing also that more than half the adults are women, I think it must be admitted that the punishment is indiscriminate as well as severe. Of course it may happen that the black sheep will accomplish the stipulated task under the goad of downright starvation, but it is an experiment which one rather dreads to see going on in a country where the people are worn to the bone with exhaustion, where plague and small-pox are rife, and where cholera is beginning its march through the famishing districts. Allowing for

D the item of fuel, and for the bunya's deductions for giving credit, the sole subsistence of grown-up persons is considerably less than i lb. of grain per diem. And it was the i lb. ration that played such havoc in previous famines. If this matter should chance to be taken up at home, it might be well to ascertain if the Government consulted the medical authorities before taking action, and what views those authorities expressed. But, apart from the risks of cholera and the defiance of the laws of life, it is surely hard measure for the Government which assumes the guardianship of the starving native to punish him for the non-fulfilment of his allotted task by putting him on less than half the rations allowed for the subsistence of convicts. Is it impossible to devise a better means than this for making famine labour productive ?