Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/345

Rh certified every month by the committee of the village association. It may, perhaps, be proper to mention that when I speak here of a village, I mean an Asli village with its attached Dakhili villages, together equivalent to an English parish or French commune. The Asli village, as the name imports, is the original one from which the others have sprang. The Dakhili villages, as the name also imports, are those sub-divisions of the village-lands which have been entered separately in the revenue records, although still belonging to the village and contained within its boundaries. The Dakhili villages or hamlets are called variously in different districts, para, chak, bhag, danga, dihi, dighi, digha, khali, bati, bari, ghat, ganj, kalpa, &c., with some other name prefixed. They are generally inhabited, but sometimes merely denote a proprietary distinction of lands. The Asli and Dakhili villages together usually contain from 1,000 to 1,500 inhabitants; and if, according to the calculation in page 229 founded on the population returns contained in Chapter I., Section XIII. of this Report, we take the average number of children between 14 and five to be about 20 per cent., it follows that in such a cluster of villages and hamlets there will be from two to three hundred children of the teachable age, affording ample scope and remuneration for the labors of one teacher. I hope also that it will appear to others, as it does to me, that the village-community, wherever it can be brought to act, is the proper authority for watching over the endowment and enforcing its conditions. I am, indeed, by no means sanguine that it will be easy to induce the villagers to combine and to act for such a purpose when and where we please, but every facility and encouragement to such associations should be given, and the attempt should be steadily and unweariedly prosecuted, for upon its success would depend an incalculable amount of good to the country. Such associations, originally formed for school-purposes and effectually contributing to their accomplishment, would gradually and almotalmost [sic] necessarily grow into nuclei of public spirit and organs for its expression in various ways and for various purposes; for the purposes of municipal government, village police, local improvement, and statistical knowledge. In time of danger from without, or difficulty from within, they would be chains of posts intersecting the country in all directions and affording ready and faithful instruments of communication and co-operation. At the present moment (April 2, 1838) in the absence of such instruments how helpless both the Government and the public feel themselves to be in their attempts to alleviate the frightful famine which afflicts the western provinces, or even to know the extent to which it exists in the interior parts of districts remote from the dwellings of public functionaries and European settlers!

Many of these details relating to the administration of village-school endowments will probably require to be modified in