Page:Statesman's Year-Book 1871.djvu/689

 REVENUE AND EXPENDITURE. 653

throughout the Presidency of Madras, as the zemindar and village renter equally deal with their tenants on this principle.

In Bombay, the revenue management is, generally speaking, ryotwar ; that is, as a rule, the occupants of Government lands settle for their land revenue, or rent, with the Government officers direct, and not through the intervention of a middle-man. Instances, however, occasionally occur, in which the Government revenues of entire villages are settled by individual superior holders, under various denominations, or by a co-partnership of superior holders. The survey and assessment of the Bombay Presidency has been almost completed on a system introduced and carefully elaborated about twenty years ago. The whole country is surveyed and mapped, and the fields distinguished by permanent boundary marks which it is penal to remove ; the soil of each field is classed according to its intrinsic qualities and to the climate ; and the rate of assessment to be paid on fields of each class in each subdivision of a district is fixed on a careful consideration of the value of the crops they are capable of producing, as affected by the proximity to market towns, roads, canals, railways, and similar external incidents, but not by improve- ments made by the ryot himself. This rate was probably about one-half of the yearly value of the land, when fixed ; but, owing to the general improvement of the country, it is not more than from a fourth to an eighth in the districts which have not been settled quite recently. The measurement and classification of the soil are made once for all ; but the rate of assessment is open to revision at the end of every thirty years, in order that the ryot, on the one hand, may have the certainty of the long period as an inducement to lay out capital, and the State, on the other, may secure that participation in the advan- tages accruing from the general progress of society to which its joint proprietorship in the land entitles it. In the thirty years' revision, moreover, only public improvements and a gezieral change of prices, but not improvements effected by the ryots themselves, are con- sidered as grounds for enhancing the assessment The ryot's tenure is permanent, provided he pays the assessment.

The important questions of the expediency of settling in per- petuity the amount of revenue to be paid to the Government by land- holders, of permitting this revenue to be redeemed for ever by the payment of a capital sum of money, and of selling the fee simple of waste lands not under assessment, have been within the last few years fully considered by the Government of India. The expediency of allowing owners of land to redeem the revenue has long been advocated as likely to promote the settlement of European colonists; but experience seems to show that advantage is very rarely taken of the power which already exists in certain cases to redeem the rent by a quit payment; and it appears unlikely that such a permission