LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE INDIAN FAMINE.
[To TRH EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.'] SIR,—When the letters were written in India on which your article in the last copy of the S'peciator that has reached us (that of August 25) was based, the prospects of Mysore were very dark indeed. But even then they were not so bad as to be incapable of exaggeration ; and it was easy to see that correspondents who predicted that 3,500,000 people must perish had lost their heads. The south-west wind, which ordinarily brings a succession of steady showers from May to the end of August, had begun favourably with a heavy down-pour, but soon, though the breeze continued damp and strong, it ceased to bring rain. And it is on this rain that the agricultural prosperity of Mysore mainly depends. On the high, dry, and sloping lands, say, on four-fifths of the cultivated area, a crop called ragi (Eleusyne coracana) is sown in June and ripens in September ; and this is the staple food of the province, selling in ordinary years at about 40 lb. for a shilling. The crop was sown very 'favourably this June, but it soon began to wither when the rain ceased. The remaining one-fifth (approximately) of the cultivated area is irrigated, partly from channels led out of the river Cauvery, mainly from tanks. Mysore has long been famous for these tanks, and is said to possess about 37,000 of them. Where- ever there is a depression in the laud, an embankment is thrown across it, with a waste-weir and a sluice ; the water is held up above it, and below it a few acres of land are sown with rice or sugar-cane, and irrigated by means of the sluice. A few hundred yards lower down the depression comes another tank, and again .another, increasing in size as they go on, till a " series " of tanks may consist of more than a hundred, all connected together, the outflow from the waste-weir of each being the chief feeder of the one below it, and the stream that issues from the waste-weir of the bottom one being a river. The tanks at the top of the series are mere ponds, those at the bottom are often small lakes, and the area irrigated by them is often very large. But they have no feeders which come from regions uninfluenced by the failure of rain; they never contain more than a year's supply of water, and 'though full in 1875, they were dry and empty in 1876, so that in that year the irrigated crop dependent on them totally failed. In 1877, things were better ; a storm in March and the rain already referred to in June did partially fill the tanks, and enabled the wet cultivation dependent on them to go on. But unfortu- nately, these tanks have another defect, besides that already men- tioned, of running dry when most needed. The crops grown under them are not popular as food, and are chiefly grown for cx.port. The Mysore people do not like rice; they can eat it when they get nothing else, but it has a tendency to bring on
bowel-complaints ; what they want is ragi. And here, too, they distinguish ; irrigated ragi (much of which is grown in Madras) is quite different from dry ragi—i.e., ragi grown in uuirrigated lands—and is not nearly so popular or nutritious.
The condition in July was, therefore, this :—The rains showed signs of failing, and the great ragi crop, which depends on the rains, was beginning to wither. If it should be altogether lost, the country would have to depend on the rice grown in the lands irrigated by the Cauvery and the tanks and on importation, and undoubtedly the case would be very bad indeed. But fortunately the worst anticipations were not to be realised. August brought a good deal of rain—not quite half the usual average, it is true, but still enough to keep the drooping plants alive—and ever since September 1 the "Viceroy's rain" (so called from the way in which it has followed his course throughout his fortunate and successful tour) has been constant and abundant. So that at the time I write we have the rice and millet of the irrigated land coming into the market, and prices already easier in consequence ; we have what escaped of the early ragi crop, revived, but belated, and safe now to ripen in a short time ; we have a great breadth of land sown with a late ragi crop, which was put in in August, and will ripen in November or December, and which at present is in a most prosperous condition, though it will need rain in October and November to pull it through; we have the land in most favourable condition for sowing the winter dry crop of horse-grain, which ripens in February or March ; and the tanks full of water to irrigate the late rice with, which is sown about now, and harvested in March ; so that altogether the improvement in our prospects is very great, and as far as I can judge, the stress of the famine ought to be over in March.
People cannot, however, live upon prospects, and until the new crops come in, the State has to provide such of them as require it with the means of subsistence. This is done in two ways,—by gratuitous relief in cooked food, and by relief works on which wages are paid. Of these two, the system of relief works has enormous advantages over the other system. It is the healthier and the more cheerful of the two ; it gratifies the self-respect of the people, who feel that they are giving something in return for their wage ; and it leaves the country furnished with a supply of useful works, planned long ago by enthusiastic engineers, but put by through the ,‘ eternal want of pence," or thrust aside by more imperious competitors. • The great glory of Bombay has been— and I trust it will never be forgotten, as long as famine literature endures—the way in which she met and conquered her famine by the institution of largo relief works, the completion of which leaves the Presidency permanently enriched. Mysore, on the other hand—it is hard to say why—took the contrary turn. Bombay, when matters were at the blackest, had about 210,000 on relief works and 60,000 on gratuitous relief. Mysore, on the let of September, had 60,000 on relief works and 230,000 on gratuitous relief. And even those 50,000 were not hardly any of them relief labourers. About half were under the Public Works Department, and its officers said, "We are professional men, we are not relief officers," and refused to move a step out of their groove to meet the famine, so that their labourers were the usual number and class of men who would be found at work in any year, and who, being paid at contract rates, were neces- sarily able-bodied. Nor were the works under the Civil officers much better; they, too, were based on estimates, so much earthwork, so many rupees; and the man in eh arge saw that he had to complete the work for the sanctioned amount, and that if be took on the weak and emaciated he would soon outrun his estimate ; so here, too, there was a tendency to hustle the feeble, the very people for whose benefit the work was started, away in favour of the strong labourer. Thus all real relief got concentrated into the " kitchens " or dining-places, at which a meal, or sometimes two meals, was given to all comers. These institutions were no doubt of great use in saving life, and were managed in the most kindly and charitable manner, but they were not worked so as to be connected with and lead up to Relief Works, and you might see 3,000 people, many of them able-bodied, sit down to eat their meal, and go home when it was done, while a road or a tank close by languished with only ten or twenty labourers on it. Another mistake was that this relief did not go far enough ; many people had fallen into a state in which the meal
not to save life. The history of was only sufficient to prolong, hundreds of such cases is shortly told. The pauper could come for a few days from his village, two or three miles off, eat his meal, and crawl back again. One day he would be overtaken by rain, and would get an attack of fever, and be unable to go ; or he would arrive too late ; after losing that day's food, he had no strength to come next day all that distance, but lay down by the roadside in a ditch, and the dogs were the first relief officers who were aware of him.
I have given this sketch, not in any spirit of fault-finding with the past, but to show the nature and the effects of the changes brought about by Lord Lytton during his visit to Southern India. His first action was to show the Public Works Department that while he appreciated their esprit de corps and their high profes- sional efficiency, nobody could be allowed to hold aloof from the campaign against the common enemy. "In famine, as in war," to use his fine simile, all forces must be concentrated on the one object, victory ; and the 1'. IV. D. officer has been trans- formed not only into a relief officer, but into the most important of all the classes of relief officers. The backbone of the famine policy is the institution of large relief works, under professional agency, and the first question was what works to take up. On the one hand, there were several large irrigation schemes,— tanks of the kind already described, or anicuts across rivers feed- ing large channels. One of these indeed, the Mari Kanawe scheme, affectionately and familiarly known as "Mary Conway," has been the Lorelei of every one who has known the province since Buchanan first visited it in 1800. Each chief engineer in turn has been bewitched by her,—has sketched her, improved on her, estimated her, and laid her by. Now was her time, if ever, but alas ! poor "Mary" requires more skilled stone-work than unskilled labour, and what is worse, her dwelling is feverish and far from the parts where crowd the applicants for labour. As for the other tanks, none of them are big, and all are somewhat in disfavour now, for their treacherous failure in the time of need ; but many of them will be taken up. Their great competitor is the railway from Bangalore to Mysore, a line eighty-six miles long, and pass- ing through an undulating country, which offers any amount of work in cuttings and embankments. The main objection to this is that it cannot be finished by famine-labour, and its completion and stocking will be a heavy charge on the impoverished State. But it is a lino of great value to the province, and will be of most value when the tanks fail most ; indeed but for the railway to Bangalore, it is hard to conceive how the famine could have been fought. It has therefore been decided to undertake it ; 5,000 famine-stricken people have already been put to work on part of it, and the line is being aligned and got ready, and will shortly employ from 20,000 to 30,000 people. As to the 5,000 who are now at work there, though they have hardly been employed for more than a fortnight, the change in their appearance is already remarkable. None of them were able-bodied, and many were in an advanced stage of emaciation. The professional officers said of many of them, "Call that fellow a labourer ? Why, he can't lift a pickaxe !" Well, they could not lift a heavy pickaxe, so we gave them a light one ; they were treated con- siderately and kindly, they were not tasked above their strength ; and now almost the whole of that gang are able-bodied labourers, doing nearly a full day's work, all cheerful, healthy, and con- tented. Had they continued as they were, recipients of gratuitous relief, fully half of them were marked for death.
Civil relief works are also being carried on, on the same prin- ciple, that the work is started not so much for the sake of the work as for the sake of the labourer ; and that the people we want to see on them are the emaciated and weakly, not the able- bodied and stout. But still, no one is repulsed or sent empty away ; every applicant for relief is provided either with labour or food, labour if possible, if not, and till labour can be got, then cooked food. We rely on three tests to protect us from the danger of having crowds of people flocking on the work who do not really need relief :-2(1.) The distance test,—i.e., that a man must work at a distance from his home, not so close that he can return to it every night. This entails a little discomfort, as he will not like the shelter of sheds on the work as much as his home. (2.) The wage test ; he only receives a wage enough to provide him with a sustenance, not enough to support non-working members of the family out of ; the whole family must therefore come on the work, if they need relief. (3.) The labour test ; for he is tasked according to his capacity of labouring, and, has to perform that task. For this end the labourers are divided into three classes,—(1), those who are moderately able- bodied, and can do 75 per cent. of the task performed by a labourer in ordinary years ; (2), the weakly and old, who can only do about half a full task ; and (3), the "special cases," young and middle-aged, adults who have been reduced to great emaciation, and are treated with liberality in order to feed them up, and enable them soon to become able-bodied. There are two scales of wage,—the higher, or A scale, consisting of the
value of a day's ration of food, with about a penny over to buy condiments ; the lower, or B scale, consisting of the same value for a ration, plus one farthing for condiments, i.e., pepper, salt, ' spice, &c. The wage is arranged on a sliding scale ; if food is 10 lbs. for the rupee, then the ration costs so much ; if 12 lbs., then so much. The labourers in Class 1 usually get the A scale of wage, and if they do not perform their task, can be reduced to the B scale ; those in class 2 are usually paid with the B scale, midi the wage is not reduced for non-performance of the task, ex- cept after great patience, and when it is quite certain that it is not due to inability, but to idleness ; then the farthing may be deducted.
When cooked food is given at a relief camp, it is subject to. the two tests of (1) residence (2) labour. Every one who is fed in a relief camp must sleep there, and must work to the best of his or her ability. At present it is necessary to feed many thousands of able-bodied people in this way, till schemes for labour are organised ; but this is only a temporary necessity, and before long these camps will become merely refuges for the old, and feeble, and even from them a little work, such as spinning, carding cotton, or picking wool, and stone-breaking, will be- exacted.
One word I wish to add, as to the orphans, of whom there are many. Where Government undertakes to do everything, it is hard to see how private charity can find any room to enter, but- this one line it has clearly to itself,—it can aid the Missionary Societies to establish orphanages, where these poor children can, be brought up as good citizens and as Christians, and I trust the Societies themselves will rise to the height of their great oppor- tunity, and will rely on the liberality and sympathy with which, the public are sure to meet their appeal.-1 am, Sir, &c., C. A. ELLIOTT,
September 28, 1877. Famine Commissioner in Mysore,
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