KhLlKI 01 INDEBTED AGRIGTLTUIUST.S. 171 



management of the collector for a term of years, not exceeding 

 twenty, whenever there is reason to believe that the liability can 

 be thereby cleared off. But the sections enacted in 1859 were not 

 efficient for the purpose in view, and therefore little acted on. 

 Those substituted in 1877 accidentally became almost unintelligible 

 and we are now amending them. Practically, therefore, sale has 

 hitherto stood in the Code unfettered. The extent to which this 

 judicial system has been allowed to play varies remarkably in 

 different parts of India. In Lower Bengal a zamindari and certain 

 subordinate tenures are freely saleable, but the tenure of an 

 occupancy-ryot is not ; 'and the local legislature are just now 

 considering whether transfer shall be allowed, provided the 

 purchaser be a brother-ryot and not a money-lender. Saleability 

 in execution will, of course, follow power to transfer. In the 

 Punjab, hereditary or joint-acquired land cannot be sold in execution 

 without the sanction of the Chief Court, or other land without 

 that of the Commissioner. In the Central Provinces and Oudh 

 ancestral property connot be so sold without the sanction of the 

 Chief Commissioner, or self-acquired property without that of the 

 Commissioner. In Ajmer all sale is absolutely prohibited. In the 

 N.-W. Provinces, Madras and Bombay sales are unrestricted. The 

 position of the question as I have just described it is generally 

 admitted to be unsatisfactory. In a correspondence originated by the 

 despatch of LORD STANLEY already quoted, carried on through the last 

 twenty years, and now here embodied in some four hundred pages of 

 print, the question of a remedy has been discussed by the most able 

 administrators throughout India. The alternatives of making land 

 by law absolutely unsaleable for debt; of enabling proprietors to make 

 it so by voluntary trusts or entails; of limiting sale (as in some 

 native states) to any surplus unnecessary for the subsistence of 

 the proprietor and his family; of replacing sale in execution by 

 usufructuary mortgages for the debter's life, or a maximum term of 

 years; of restricting sales to specifically pledged land; and of 

 confining the power of sale to the Chief Court of a district all 

 these have found powerful and zealous advocates. In favour of 

 restriction generally, it is urged that to a community whom a variety of 

 circumstances combine to constrain or tempt into debt, the addition of 

 th land to the security they can offer is no advantage whatever, but 

 the reverse. It merely amounts to a permission to live on capital, instead 



