GRANT OF LOANS AND ADVANCES TO AGRICULTURISTS, 57 



improvements, and to them the necessity for keeping on good terms 

 with the village money-lender does not apply ; but the great majority 

 of cultivators even those very well off all over the country, must 

 occasionally have to apply for loans for temporary purposes. Well, 

 I suppose, the logical deduction from this would be ' Then why 

 not give up the whole business and try and arrange a system of 

 companies or banks conducted by private enterprise which shall 

 take over from you the agricultural loans, and at the same time 

 carry out the ordinary domestic and industrial loans which the 

 ryot wants at all times and in all parts of India ?' 



We have given a great deal of attention to this subject, with the 

 assistance of my Hon'ble friends, MAJOR BARING, MR. CROSTHWAITE 

 and others ; we have been practically working at it all the season ; 

 it has been thoroughly threshed out, and a scheme up to a certain 

 point has been devised ; but the more we worked at it, and the 

 deeper we dug, the greater the difficulties, and the more insuper- 

 able they seemed. We were met by these two main difficulties, 

 in regard to Northern India especially, first, that the ryot in 

 those parts has no transferable interest in his land which he can offer 

 as security, and the only interest he can offer his crops are pre- 

 viously hypothecated to the landlord. These were the two points 

 at which we struck. We got pretty well on with the work, when it 

 was brought to our notice that a gentleman in Bombay MR. (now 

 SIR WILLIAM) WEDDERBURN was at work on a similar scheme, and 

 he had the advantage of being in communication with certain 

 bankers at Poona who were apparently willing to assist him in 

 starting an experiment of the kind. It occurred to us that the 

 experiment of an Agricultural Banking Society aided by Government 

 should, in the first instance, if tried at all, be tried in a 

 selected tract of country, and not thrown to be torn in pieces by 

 the fortune or ill-fortune which might attend it under the varying 

 conditions of different parts of India, and, when we came to consider 

 to what tract of country we should apply it, it seemed to us that very 

 obvious advantages existed in regard to the Deccan which did not 

 exist in any other part of India. In the first place, the cultivator of 

 the Deccan has a transferable interest in his land, and, in the second 

 place, he has no landlord coming between him and the Government. 

 Well* SIR WILLIAM WEDDERBURN was good enough to come up to 

 Simla, and we had various conferences with him, and the upshot of it 

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