VILLAGE UNIONS NEEDED

What is needed for the improvement of administration of justice in India is greater decentralisation. The mistake which Warren Hastings committed in the last century has not yet been rectified; virtually all power is still centred in the hands of the district officer and his police; little or no power or trust is reposed in the people themselves. The people of an entire district or sub-division of a district look up to the district officer or to his police for decision in the triflingest matters; and all local authority which village elders and village panchyets enjoyed of old has been swept away under a system of administration far too minute and centralised. One of the evils of this system is that the officials are not in touch with the people; they recognise no constituted leaders and heads of the people; they deal with the people through the worst of all possible channels, the police. The police report on the failure of crops or the prevalence of distress; they distribute cholera pills and carry out famine relief measures; they report on floods and inundations; they form the only administrative link between the people and the officials. In the pettiest

however, filled me with doubts. The post-mortem report seemed to show that the death had been produced by external violence, not by poison. I sent the supposed poisonous root to the medical officer of the district. He tried the juice on a dog, and made other experiments, and reported it was not a juice which would kill, even if taken by the spoonful. I then secretly went to the place of occurrence in a boat and made an investigation. The whole truth then came out. The deceased was an old thief. The police had caught him in the act of theft, and had illtreated him till the man died. The police then got into a fright, because the death could not be concealed; and they fabricated the whole story of the suicide, and of the wife's abetting the suicide, in order to get a judicial verdict about the death of the thief, and so keep the true cause of the death undisclosed. I would not have mentioned this case if it were a solitary instance of the dishonesty of the Indian police. Unfortunately it is not.

disputes the villagers go up to the Magistrate or the police for settlement; the autonomy of Indian village communities, which outlived centuries of rule under Hindu and Mohamedan kings, is virtually gone; and the agricultural population now rush to law courts and impoverish themselves. Litigation is demoralising; thousands of simple and truthful agriculturists are tutored in falsehood in order that they may be effective witnesses; and the nation is judged by the falsehood uttered in courts. "I have heard," says a high Indian official, "one of the most eminent of our judges doubt whether the perjury that goes on in his court in England could be surpassed in India.” 1 But Englishmen are not judged by the perjury of English courts; while the simple and truthful people of India are judged by the perjury of Indian courts, because Englishmen seldom see them and seldom know them except in law courts. One of the few Englishmen in this century whose duties led him to mix with the people in their homes and huts—and not merely in law courts-has recorded his opinion of the truthful character of Indian villagers, in which every one who knows them will agree. Villagers, says Colonel Sleeman, adhere habitually to the truth in their own panchyets. "I have had before me," he adds, "hundreds of cases in which a man's property, liberty, and life had depended upon his telling a lie, and he has refused to tell it."

Village unions are now in course of formation in different parts of India. It is possible to vest these bodies with some power to decide local disputes and settle simple money claims, and generally to manage their own petty village concerns. The endeavour was made early in this century by Munro in Madras and Elphinstone in Bombay, and it failed because village courts cannot exist side by side with higher tribunals 1 Sir John Strachey's "India" (1894), p. 307.

empowered to adjudicate the same cases. This mistake may now be avoided; and with our additional experience of eighty years we may surely make the attempt now with greater chance of success. It is demoralising to administrators that they should be in no real touch with the people; and it is demoralising to a great agricultural people to have no kind of organised bodies and recognised leaders among themselves, and to have no real contact with the officials and administrators except through the hated and dreaded medium of the police.

It is a sad truth that with increased facilities in communication between Europe and India, Englishmen in India live less among the people, mix less with the people, know less of the people, than they did seventy years ago, in the days of Munro and Elphinstone, Malcolm and Bentinck. And this makes it all the more necessary and imperative in the interests of good government that both in villages and in provincial capitals, both in judicial and in executive matters, representative leaders of the people should be elected to represent the feelings, the sentiments, and the wishes of the people, and to stand as real interpreters between the people and their rulers. In the executive Councils of the Viceroy and the Provincial Governors, no less than in village unions, there should be room fo, trusted leaders of the people, to be their spokesmenr to represent their interests, to keep the Government in touch with the people. The Government of India needs be immensely strong amidst the vast and varied population of that country, and it will add to the strength of the Government to make the administration a little less autocratic and a little more in touch with the people.

INDUSTRIES IN INDIA

BY SIR M. M. BHOWNAGGREE, K.C.I.E., M.P.

Of all the numerous subjects which a well-wisher of India is called upon to take into his serious consideration, there is none of such surpassing interest and importance as that of her industrial development, and as it is now a universally accepted principle that the growth of industries among a people is in proportion to their instruction in the sciences and arts applicable to their practical pursuit, the theme of technical education in India is one which, from reasons which will appear later on, I approach with much deliberation and with a certain feeling of anxiety. I must at once premise that the reflections which the subject presents in its economic, political, and educational aspects, are so varied and vast that I could not pretend to deal with them here exhaustively. The multiform diversity of the ethical, physical, religious, and social conditions of the country, and of the races inhabiting it, require the elucidation of propositions and exceptions, with peculiar reference to the different provinces and castes, which the limits of this paper will not permit of my attempting in detail. In the absence of such special treatment of the subject, the information I convey, and the conclusions I draw in the course of this paper, might seem here and there open to doubt and objection, but when it is remembered that I am speaking in one breath as it were of a country not far short of two million square miles in extent, inhabited by a congeries of nearly three hundred millions of vastly diversified races of

people, I cannot well be expected to treat the subject in any more definite and specialised, or rather less general method than that which I have chosen to employ. It is the only method possible in dealing with so vast an amount of matter in so short a space as is placed at our disposal.

The want of coal and iron, the simple needs of the people, their indisposition to migrate to industrial centres from their agricultural village homes, the limits which religion and custom place on their aspirations and on healthy inter-racial competition, and other such causes, are unfavourable to the dissemination of technical instruction. On the other hand, the caste system of the people can be utilised in improving workmanship and enlarging the sphere of labour generally, and lends itself to conditions of co-operative work in factories, the rising standards of life, and the enormous imports of foreign manufactures for the production of articles of daily use or consumption. The extension of general education, and the growth of Western notions as to the objective of industrial labour being the common weal of the country, instead of mainly contributing, as it did in former times, to the pride and luxury of the ruling and aristocratic classes, are designed to prepare large communities to burst the bounds of hereditary employment within fixed and orthodox limits, and to proceed to the extension and application of the principle of science and art to practical pursuits, or, in other words, for the reception of technical education in its widest and best sense.

I propose, in the first place, to enlarge upon those conditions of Indian life which will enable us to realise whether, and how far, the habits and wants of her people at the present day demand a supply of such articles as require in their manufacture skilled labour based upon technical instruction. Of the 288,000,000 of people who form the population of