Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/771

747 AGRICULTURE.] INDIA 747 however, are here given for what they may be worth. Out of a classified total of about 62,000,000 adult males, 2,232,000, or 3 6 per cent., were returned as professional or in Government service ; 3,844,000, or 6 2 per cent., as in domestic service ; 34,844,000, or 56 2 per cent., as agricultural ; 3,224,000, or 5 2 per cent., as com mercial ; 8,122,000, or 131 per cent., as industrial ; 7,626,000, or 12 3 per cent., as labourers ; and 2,108,000, or 3 4 per cent., as in dependent and non-productive. iccific An attempt was also made to collect statistics of persons afflicted firnii- with certain specific infirmities, but here again the results possess s. little value. The number of insane persons and idiots was returned at 67,000, or 1 in 2700 of the population, being less than th of the r.ite prevailing in England. The deaf and dumb numbered 134,000, or 1 in 1340, a proportion about half as great again as in England ; the blind numbered 354,000, or rather less than 1 in 500, which is double the English rate ; the lepers numbered 96,000, or 1 in 1875.
 * al sta- Returns of both births and deaths are now regularly collected
 * ics. over almost the entire area under British administration. In towns

the returns are furnished through the municipalities, while in the rural tracts the agency employed is the police. The figures thus obtained are for the most part so evidently inadequate that it would only be misleading to reproduce them in this place. Suffice it to say that the sanitary commissioner accepts as approximately correct a calculation which estimates the average duration of life in India at thirty years and eight months, which is equivalent to an annual death-rate of 32 57 per thousand. During 1877, the year of famine, the ascertained death-rate in Madras rose to 53 - 2, while the ascertained birth-rate fell to 16 - 3 per thousand. Both these rates are, of course, mere approximations to the truth, but they serve to indicate how famine attacks a people from two sides. In 1877 the death-rate among European troops in India was 12 &quot;71 per thousand, being the lowest ever recorded; among native troops, 13 38 per thousand; and in the public jails, 61 95 per thousand, rising to 176 &quot;01 per thousand in the jails of Madras. AGRICULTURE. The cultivation of the soil is the occupation of the Indian people, in a sense which is difficult to realize in England, and which cannot be adequately expressed by figures. As the land tax forms the mainstay of the im perial revenue, so the rdyat or cultivator constitutes the unit of the social system. The organized village commu nity contains many other members besides the cultivators, but they all exist for his benefit, and all alike are directly maintained from the produce of the village fields. Even in considerable towns, the traders and handicraftsmen almost always possess plots of land of their own, on which they raise sufficient grain to supply their families with food. The operations of rural life are familiar to every class. They are enveloped in a cloud of religious sanctions, and serve to mark out by their recurring periods the annual round of common life. According to the returns of the general cen sus of 1872, the number of adult males engaged in agricul ture amounts to nearly 35 millions, or 56 &quot;2 per cent, of the total. To these ou^bt to be added almost all the labourers, an additional 7 millions, or 12 3 percent., thus raising the grand total of persons directly supported by the land to more than two-thirds of the entire number of adult males, besides those indirectly or incidentally con nected with it. But though agriculture thus forms the staple industry of the country, its practice is pursued in different provinces with infinite variety of detail. Everywhere the same per petual assiduity is found, but the inherited experience of generations has taught the cultivators to adapt their simple methods to differing circumstances. For irrigation, native patience and ingenuity have devised means which com pare favourably with the colossal projects of Government. Manure is copiously applied to the more valuable crops whenever manure is available, its use being limited by poverty and not by ignorance. The rotation of crops is not adopted as a principle of cultivation but in practice it is well known that a succession of exhausting crops cannot be taken in consecutive seasons from the same field, and the ad vantage of fallows is widely recognized. The periodicity of the seasons usually allows two, and sometimes three, har vests in the year, but not necessarily, nor indeed usually, on the same fields. For inexhaustible fertility, and for reten- tiveness of moisture in a diy year, no soil in the world can surpass the regar or &quot; black cotton-soil &quot; of the Deccan. In the broad river basins, the inundations deposit annually a fresh top-dressing of silt, thus superseding the necessity of manures. The name of rice has from time immemorial been so Rice, closely associated with Indian agriculture, that it is diffi cult to realize how comparatively small an area is planted with this crop. If we except the deltas of the great rivers and the long strip of land fringing the western coast, rice may be called an occasional crop throughout the remainder of the peninsula. But where rice is grown, it is grown to the exclusion of all other crops. In British Burmah, out of a total cultivated area of 2,833,520 acres in 1877-78, as many as 2,554,853 acres, or 90 per cent., were under rice. Independent Burmah, on the other hand, grows no rice, but imports largely from British territory. For Bengal, unfortunately, no general statistics are available. But taking Rangpur as a typical district, it was there found that 1 1 million acres, out of a classified total of a little over If million acres, or 88 per cent., were devoted to rice. Similar proportions hold good for the province of Orissa, the deltas of the Godavari, Kistna, and Kaveri (Cauvery), and the lowlands of Travancore, Malabar, Kanara, and the Concan. For the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, again, no agricultural statistics are available ; but though rice, grown in damp localities, or with the help of irriga tion, forms a favourite food for the upper classes, the local supply requires to be supplemented by importation from Bengal. Throughout the remainder of the country, except in Assam, which is agriculturally a continuation of the Bengal delta, the cultivation of rice occupies but a subor dinate place. The average out-turn per acre in Bengal has been estimated at 15 maunds, or 1200 Ib, of cleaned rice. In the years 1877-78, when famine was raging in southern India, the total exports of rice from Calcutta amounted to more than 1 6 million cwts. In British Burmah there is but a single rice harvest in the year, corresponding to the dman of Bengal. The grain is reddish in colour and of a coarse quality; but the out-turn is much higher than in Bengal, reaching in some places an average of 2000 and 2500 Ib per acre. The annual exports of rice from Burmah amount to about 12 million cwts. Besides being practically the sole crop grown in the deltaic swamps, rice is raised in patches in all the hill-valleys, from Coorg to the Himalayas. Wheat is grown to some extent in almost every district ; Wheat, but, broadly speaking, it may be said that wheat does not thrive where rice does, nor, indeed, anywhere south of the Deccan. The great wheat-growing tract of India is the Punjab, where, in 1877-78, nearly 7 million acres, or 37 per cent, of the total cultivated area, were under this crop. For the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, in default of actual statistics, it has been estimated that the total area under wheat is as large as in the Punjab, though the relative proportion- is less. Wheat is also grown in Behar and in the districts of Bengal that lie south of the Ganges. In the Central Provinces, in 1877-78, wheat was grown on 23 per cent, of the cultivated area, being the chief crop in the districts of Hoshangdbad, Narsinhpur, and Si igar. In Bombay the corresponding proportion was less than 5 per cent., and in Sind 12 per cent. It has been conjectured that the total area under wheat in India is equal to the area under the same crop in the United States. Nor is the general out-turn contemptible, averaging about 13 bushels per acre in the Punjab, as compared with an average of 15i bushels for the whole of France. The quality, also, of the grain is high enough to satisfy the demands of English millers ; and &quot; Calcutta Club No. 1 &quot; commands a price in Mark Lane not much below that of tho