THE GOSABA EXPERIMENT
Sia,—Arising out of Mr. Wakinshaw's interesting letter in your issue of March 9th, in introducing his one rupee currency note, Sir Daniel Hamilton had two things in mind. (t) He wished to give practical demonstration of his faith in a paper currency. (2) Government "one rupee currency notes had been in circulation for a time and then with- drawn; he felt that this would entail hardship on the small cultivator who had to borrow at certain seasons and he resolved that his Gosaba tenantry should not suffer; so, for their benefit he had the Gosaba One Rupee Note printed and put in circulation. Being a private financial Venture its range was confined to Gosaba. It was later withdrawn by the estate authorities when the Government one rupee notes came back into circulation ; but while it functioned it was a great success, as I know from personal experience.
Sir Daniel Hamilton died in December, 1939, and since then it has not been possible for his widow, Lady Hamilton, because of passage difficulties, to visit Gosaba ; but the work goes on under the abletmanage- ment of the Bengali gentleman whose name got rather mixed up in Mr. Wakinshaw's letter. Here is a striking tribute to the quality of the Gosaba experiment. When famine stalked through the Province of Bengal the manager wrote me on December 23, 1943:—" Despite great food scarcity in the province Gosaba could manage without much difficulty. Thank God for all the great genius and labour of our beloved master, without which Gosaba would have fared like many of the other
places in the province."—Yours faithfully, J. Z. HODGE. 28 Corstorphine Park Gardens, Edinburgh.
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