were needed to build railway tracks. Indian
trees, particularly sal, deodar, and teak, were preferred for their
strength over other Indian timbers. These three species were intensively
exploited. Much sal was extracted from the forests of the Jungle Mahals
of West Bengal and Bihar. Timber went to England too for the building
of railways. The myth that India’s forests were inexhaustible was
exploded. It was in this background that the colonial state, in order to
manage and control forest resources, started the Forest Department and
passed the Indian Forest Act, 1865. This was a draconian act which
restricted the use of forest resources by indigenous groups who resented
it. In order to contain protest and resistance the British enacted the
dreaded Criminal Tribes Act, 1871. During the entire colonial period
there were frequent insurrections by tribal people against the colonial
state. The legacy of the colonial forest acts continues to haunt
contemporary times as well.
Military and civil administrative costs in British India consumed an average of
eighty
per cent of the budget, leaving twenty per cent to be divided among the
various departments concerned. Agriculture was left to its
deteriorating condition. Irrigation was neglected. Arthur Cotton wanted
the colonial state to give priority to irrigation rather than building
railway network, but his suggestion
was turned down by the imperial
goverment in England. Outbreak of successive famines in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century ultimately prompted the government under
British Crown to initiate some steps for the building of dams.
The
Ryotwari system intended to create a large body of independent peasants,
who would be protected from the “corrupt and faithless zamindar,”
however, in reality achieved the contrary result of strengthening the
position of the big landlords. The government showed little interest in
protecting the interests of tenants in
ryotwari areas. Since land was
the main source of revenue, its rigorous collection became an
imperative policy of the British. The Torture Commission, appointed by
the Company government in Madras in its report presented in 1855 exposed
the atrocities perpetrated by the Indian revenue and police officials
in the process
of collecting land tax from the cultivators. The
Torture Act which justified forcible collections of land revenue was
abolished only after 1858.
Charles Travelyan to a Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1840 made
the following observation: “The peculiar kind of silky cotton formerly grown in
Bengal, from which the fine Dacca muslins used to be made, is hardly ever seen. The population of the town of Dacca has fallen from 150, 000 to 30, 000 or 40,000 and the jungle and malaria are fasten croaching upon the town. ... Dacca, which was the Manchester of India has fallen off from a very flourishing town to a very poor and small one; the distress there has been very great indeed.”
Abbe Dubois, a French Catholic missionary, before his return to Europe in 1823 wrote: “misery and desolation prevailed everywhere and that thousands of
Abbe Dubois weavers were dying of hunger in the different districts of the
Presidency [Madras].” “The misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce.... The bones of cotton weavers are beaching the Gangetic
plains of India,” said the Governor General William Bentinck.
பத்தாம் வகுப்பு சமூக அறிவியல் 2022 ஆம் ஆண்டு அனைத்து மாவட்டங்களில் நடத்தப்பட்ட அரையாண்டு தேர்வு சமூகஅறிவியல் வினாத்தாள் கீழேPdf கொடுக்கப்பட்டுள்ளது
10th SS All District Half Yearly Question Paper 2022
Drain of Wealth
Dadabhai Naoroji in his Poverty and Un-BritishRule in India explained
how the English rulers were different from the earlier invaders. He said, in
the case of former foreign invaders, they plundered and went back. They made, Dadabhai Naoroji no doubt, great wounds, but India, with her industry, revived and healed the wounds. When the invaders became rulers of the country they settled down in it; whatever was the condition of their rule, there was at least no material
or moral drain in the county. But with the English the case was different. There are the great wounds of the first wars in the burden of the public debt and those wounds are kept perpetually open and widening by draining away the lifeblood in a continuous stream. The former rulers were like butchers hacking here and there, but the English with their scientificscalpel cut to the very heart, and yet, there is no
wound to be seen, and soon the plaster of the high talk of civilization, progress and what not covers up the wound.
India’s loan to England was 130 million pounds in 1837. It increased to 220 million
pounds, of this 18 percent was for conducting wars waged against Afghanistan and Burma. A government report of 1908 informed that on account of railways, India had incurred a debt of 177.5 million pounds. In order to give outlet to the saturated capital the British secured the capital from private enterprise in England. In
the form of guaranteed interest of 5 percent, the Colonial state promised to repay the interest in sterling. There was a loss of 220 million pounds
to India on this score. Calling this as drain of wealth Dadabhai Naoroji lamented that had the money drained to England remained in the pockets of Indians,
India would have economically progressed. Even Gazni Mahmud’s pillage stopped after eighteen times but the British plunder seemed to be unending, he quipped. R.C. Dutt estimated that during the last decade of the reign of QueenVictoria (1891-1901), of the total income 647 million pounds, 159 million pounds drained to
England. This worked to 44 percent of the total income of the country.
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