Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924073057345).pdf/178

 170 KHE Now the ordinary rate of bullock hire for a pair with a cart and driver is eight annas, and no doubt deducting two annas for the driver this leaves three annas for each bullock; but this is the Government rate of hire for officers who take bullocks with gentle violence from their ploughs, and it is straining the argument to say that because Government officers pay for one day at that rate, therefore the annual cost to a tenant is to be so estimated. In point of fact, if bullocks are hired by the month or year, they can be had for two-thirds of that sum. But in truth the cost of bullocks, or anything else, cannot be determined by the price till there is an open market and a sufficient number of both buyers and sellers to cause competition. I will therefore work out the calculation previously given in combination with Mr. Halsey's facts. The ordinary country bullock is very seldom in- deed offered for hire ; he can drag a plough, but it would not pay to use him in a cart. The only way to determine the value of bullock hire is to count what a yoke costs to buy and keep. Now average bullocks sufficient for ploughing purposes cost Rs. 30 a pair; they feed simply on straw and chaff enriched with the grain left behind by the wasteful country process of threshing and winnowing; they sometimes get oil-cake when they have been working hard. It is impossible to say what the cost of this bhúsa, as it is called, is, because there is no open market for it throughout the rural district, nearly every one producing as much as he wants; and what is sold in the large towns is no criterion, carriage being such an important item of the cost. It is easy simply to omit the value of straw from the land products and to disregard bullocks' food as an item in the cost of cultivation. Therefore the tenant will only have to pay interest on Rs. 30 at 12 per cent. per annum Rs. 3-8, and will have to keep up a sinking fund of about the same sum to replace the bullocks when their usual eight years of service terminate by death or decrepitude; and allowing five rupees for cordials and extra feeding after hard work, repair of plough, spade, &c., the annual cost of the pair of bullocks will be Rs. 12. Now a pair of bullocks will work five acres, so the cost of their labour per acre will be two rupees eight annas per acre, or including the value of straw, * under eight rupees per acre, instead of above thirteen as estimated by Mr. Halsey for wbeat. Similarly Mr. Halsey allows 92 days' human labour for an acre of wheat at Rs. 0-1-6, or 21 per day, and Rs. 0-3-0 for reapers. This is too high an estimate, for very much of the work can be done, and gene- rally is done, by women and boys, and he has no right to allow double wages at harvest time to peasants labouring in their own fields, because such men would demand that if reaping other men's crops. Reaping is not harder work than irrigating, and a fancy price exacted at a time of pressure for ordinary labour is no measure of its value as a whole. Follow- ing for a moment Mr. Halsey's mode of calculation, and allowing eighty days of adult male labour at Rs. 0-1-6, the cost will be Rs. 7-8-0, and the McCullogh's Commercial Dictionary.
 * Fodder valued at five rupees per acre on rough analogy from English valuation