THE INDIAN PEASANT AND HIS FUTURE

Report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India. Cmd. 3132. 1928.

THE

HE Indian peasant is no modern phenomenon and, as far as we can penetrate into the past, we get glimpses of him very much as he is now. We see a man living in a village along with others like him, cultivating a small portion of its land wholly or mainly by the labour of his family, responsible for the management and the finance of his undertaking, bearing the brunt of unfavourable seasons, getting the worst of the market, whether he buys or sells, plagued by money-lenders and tax-collectors, living hard, and apt to submit to hard living as inevitable, but withal by far the most important person in the country. An aphorism current in the fourteenth century described peasants and soldiers as "the two arms of the kingdom," and, broadly speaking, that is true to-day.

I must not linger, however, over the Indian peasant's past, because it is with his future that I am now concerned. A new era was opened for him in the early years of the present century, when Lord Curzon initiated a concerted policy of agricultural development, based on one side on scientific research, on the other side on a co-operative movement in the villages. Ten years of vigorous effort brought into existence the skeleton of an organisation designed to carry out this policy; and the concrete results secured, even in those early years, were sufficient to show that success was not unattainable, though recurring obstacles and occasional disappointments testified to the magnitude and difficulty of the task.

A check to progress resulted from the war, when establishments were depleted, and funds for expansion became increasingly difficult to secure. After the war, the constitutional reforms. operated to throw the bureaucratic organisation out of gear, and a growing feeling of anxiety regarding the future became manifest in official circles. Simultaneously there were signs of movement in Indian public opinion. The inspiration of Lord Curzon's policy had been purely official. It was drawn from the investigations of various commissions and from the efforts of a long and

distinguished line of rural administrators. There was no popular demand behind it, and its promulgation produced few manifestations of popular welcome. The rise of Indian nationalism, however, brought a gradual change. Ardent politicians, eager to lead the country forward, found that there was no money to pay for the journey; and the inadequacy of the national income to satisfy the new national aspirations forced them to turn their attention to the economic basis of the national life. Early hopes of a large and sudden industrial development shrank on contact with the hard facts of the situation; and men realised by degrees that in a peasant country the peasant must pay, as in India he has always paid, for whatever is to be done.

Thus public opinion came more or less into line with official anxieties, and the result was the appointment, in April, 1926, of a Royal Commission, with the Marquess of Linlithgow as its chairman, charged " to make recommendations for the improvement of agriculture and to promote the welfare and prosperity of the rural population." The magnitude of the task will be better understood if we recall that the rural population of British India numbers 222 millions, a figure by comparison with which the 25 millions of town-dwellers become insignificant, and that it consists of over 40 millions of independent producing units, living under almost every imaginable variety of climate, and growing almost every known crop. To produce a comprehensive report on such a reference in the space of twenty-seven months, as the Commissioners have done, is in itself a remarkable achievement.

The report is unanimous. There is no minute of dissent, and the very few reservations on matters of detail serve mainly to emphasise the fact that we have the considered verdict of a competent body, not the conflicting opinions of individual experts. To the student of rural economics, a further ground for confidence is the precision and efficiency with which the report brushes aside various nostrums and short cuts to prosperity, pressed on it by urban witnesses who were obsessed by the need for action, but were unfamiliar with the conditions of the problem. The hard truth is that there are no short cuts. The alignment of the road leading to rural prosperity is now tolerably well known, and its most significant feature is that in the early stages the gradients are terribly steep. Apparent short cuts are soon found

to be impracticable, and in places a long diversion may be necessary; but, however much the track may be eased, nothing but the strongest team and the best leadership will suffice to surmount the escarpment, which bounds the plain, and penetrate to the uplands, where the going is easier, though it is uphill all the way.

The difficulties of the journey are fully recognised by the Commission, whose proposals for surmounting them are embodied in the large number of 687 specific conclusions and recommendations. Even the baldest summary of these would more than fill the space at my disposal, and it must suffice to indicate their general purport. In the first place, it is clear that the main lines of the organisation established by Lord Curzon have stood the test of time. There are weaknesses, and there have been failures, in one matter or another; but, so far as the technical departments are concerned, the need now is for expansion and intensification, not dismantling and reconstruction.

In the second place, the Commissioners insist that the technical departments-those concerned with agriculture, irrigation, or veterinary work-do not offer by themselves a complete solution of the central problem of rural poverty, and require to be supplemented by effort applied over a much wider field. In both these branches, three main ideas can be traced underlying the specific recommendations. Two of these, the connected ideas of teamwork and leadership, have already been incidentally mentioned; the third, and the most important of all, is insistence on the psychological factors in the problem.

The report thus comes definitely into line with the recent work of rural economists in other countries. Peasant-farming is not an occupation but a life, and any large change in the farming involves a change in the farmer's mentality. The essentials for an advance towards rural prosperity have been stated once for all in the formula" better farming, better business, better living," associated with the name of Sir Horace Plunkett; but experience has shown that the three things, though they must be separated for the purpose of analysis, are in practice very closely interdependent. Improvements in agriculture, in marketing, and in finance, must go hand in hand; and, whatever governments and departments may offer in the way of help or guidance, the last word is with the peasant, whose acceptance or rejection of the offer is decisive.

In the final chapter of the report, the Commissioners emphasise their conclusion that :

No substantial improvement in agriculture can be effected unless the cultivator has the will to achieve a better standard of living, and the capacity, in terms of mental equipment and physical health, to take advantage of the opportunities which science, wise laws and good administration may place at his disposal. Of all the factors making for prosperous agriculture, by far the most important is the outlook of the peasant himself.

And so it comes about that the official title of the report strikes the reader as something of a misnomer, for its main subject is not agriculture, in the ordinary restricted sense of the term, but rural reconstruction, directed to produce an environment in which this " will to live better may have room to develop and become an effective force. The Commissioners declare that :

The demand for a better life can, in our opinion, be stimulated only by a deliberate and concerted effort to improve the general conditions of the country-side, and we have no hesitation in affirming that the responsibility for initiating the steps required to effect this improvement rests with Government.

This is the keynote of the report, a mass attack on the peasants' mentality, directed to convince them that a better life is within their reach, and that it is worth their while to take what is offered. What are the chances of success in such a campaign? Can a lasting change be wrought in what it has been the fashion to regard as the most stable factor in "the unchanging East"? The answer to these questions is found in the fact, which to my mind it is impossible to doubt, that changes are already in progress in the desired direction. As yet they are small and localised, but the movement can be detected, and a concerted effort for its acceleration and extension is a perfectly reasonable proposition. There is no question of reversing existing tendencies, or of imparting motion to a stationary mass; the problem is rather to remove obstacles, and provide the encouragement and inspiration required to enable the movement to gather force.

To readers who may be disinclined to accept this view it may be pointed out that the choice does not lie between improvement of rural life and stagnation at the existing level. The Commissioners hold that under British rule the economic position of the peasantry, taken as a whole, has improved; but the main

factor in this improvement has been the progressive levelling-up of Indian prices to the world-standard, and this process is now practically complete. If things should go on as at present, the result would not be stagnation, but rather progressive impoverishment as the rural population multiplies. The choice lies between letting things get gradually worse, and making a concerted effort to improve them.

On the other hand, it may perhaps be objected that the situation calls for no great effort, that the peasants are already moving in the desired direction, and that the movement is best left to itself. The answer, I think, must be that the existing obstacles are too great, and are likely to arrest the incipient movement, if at this juncture Government stands aside. Inside the village there is ignorance, ill-health, malnutrition, lack of any source of inspiration or guidance; outside it, defective communications, a vicious system of marketing, demoralising methods of finance, an almost total lack of help from the more advanced sections of the nation. In my judgment the case for vigorous action against these, and the other, obstacles described by the Commissioners in their report is overwhelmingly strong, alike to the economist, the philanthropist, and the statesman. The economist will look mainly to the huge mass of poverty and waste; the philanthropist will be moved by the sum of preventible human misery; the statesman will consider that, by the decision of Parliament, the peasants must eventually be the rulers of their country, and that no time should be lost in fitting them for that position.

Rural reconstruction, then, is the policy recommended by the Commissioners. The programme they present for its realisation is both comprehensive and detailed; for a full description of it the student must turn to the report itself, but a general view of it can perhaps be obtained by tracing its two main ideas, team-work and leadership, ideas which are closely interdependent. Almost at the outset we meet a very definite condemnation of the existing organisation for research, the necessary basis of all progress in technique. The various research institutions, central and provincial, have failed to keep in touch; the independent work of individuals has been largely sterilised; the need now is "to devise some method of infusing a different spirit into the whole organisation.. and of bringing about the realisation on the