RELIEF OF INDEBTED AGRICULTURISTS. 129 



or the productive capacity of the land ; he had also contracted habits 

 of increased expenditure on personal comfort, which in his less 

 prosperous circumstances he was loath to forego. 



As an illustration of the extent of indebtedness and hopeless 

 embarrassment which had been reached in the case of some of these 

 ryots at the time of the outbreak, he (MR. COCKERELL) would quote 

 some statistics furnished in the Commissioner's Report. The particu- 

 lars in this respect of some twelve villages selected at random had 

 been recorded, showing an aggregate book-debt of nearly two lakhs 

 of rupees, whilst the revenue assessment of the debtors' lands 

 amounted to about rupees 10,000, and their proprietary interest in 

 the same was estimated to be equivalent to ten years' revenue ; so 

 that the total debt in these villages was double the full value of the 

 entire land belonging to the debtors. This would seem obviously to 

 point to the conclusion that the consideration actually passed to the 

 debtors in these must have been wholly disproportionate to the sum of 

 their recorded obligations ; for under no other hypothesis could the 

 money-lending creditors carry on their business, where the value of 

 the security was so much below the outstanding debts represented by 

 it, without absolute ruin. 



This conclusion, as to the extreme disparity between the extent of 

 the accommodation actually obtained by the borrower and his recorded 

 obligation in respect of it, was fully corroborated by the facts which 

 had been recorded by a member of the Commission in regard to this 

 question. He (MR. COCKERELL) would cite a particular case an 

 extreme one certainly, but one that had been brought to light in the 

 course of the enquiry. A ryot had borrowed rupees 10, and at the 

 end of ten years from the date of the loan, his account with his 

 creditor stood thus : he had paid rupees 110 and still owed rupees 

 220. So that in the short space of ten years, through the process of 

 repeated renewal of bonds in which compound interest at high rates 

 was added to the principal, his debt had been made to mount up to 

 thirty- three times the sum actually borrowed by him. 



The causes of this extreme indebtedness had been recorded in 

 much detail in the report of the Commission, and the possible effect 

 of the Government revenue assessments and the state of the law 

 applicable to the relations of creditor and debtor, in conducing to the 

 embarrassments of the agriculturists, had formed the subject of close 

 enquiry and full discussion, not only in the general report, but also in 



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