MARKETING.THE HARVEST 215 



dispose of his produce, and in this respect the develop- 

 ment of the country during the nineteenth century has 

 been altogether beneficial to him. This facility of 

 marketing is a comparatively new thing in India. The 

 development of the means of communication is perhaps 

 the most important economic event of the nineteenth 

 century, and the multiplication of metalled roads and 

 railways is alone sufficient to explain the break-up of 

 the old industrial organization, in which every village 

 in India was self-sufficing. It must always be borne 

 in mind that before this era of cheap and rapid transit 

 the cultivator was at the mercy of the conditions of 

 the local market, and a year of teeming plenty might 

 be almost as disastrous to him as a short harvest. 

 Old reports abound in references to the distress of the 

 cultivators when the harvests were too bountiful, and 

 Bishop Heber, in 1825, argued in favour of the estab- 

 lishment of Government granaries upon the express 

 ground that the Government purchase of grain would 

 keep up the price * when the cultivator was likely to 

 be ruined by the impossibility of obtaining a re- 

 munerative price.'* So, too, the decay of the pros- 

 perity of the Parganna Kunch, in the district of Jalaun, 

 is assigned to an era of exceptionally low prices : 

 * This was a time when, beyond all example, grain 

 was a perfect drug in the market. The people know 

 it as the teemunia period, when, as the name im- 

 ports, 3 maunds of gram and 60 seers of wheat were 

 selling for the rupee. Its duration is given at three 

 years — 1849 to 1851. Twenty-eight estates are said to 

 have broken down at once. Within this meagre 

 compass the tradition is vividly recalled, but no further 

 particulars can be gleaned. It is declared that the 

 very next year after this extraordinary depression the 

 pendulum swung violently the other way : the rains 

 are said to have totally failed in the months of July 



* Bishop Heber's * Narrative of a Journey through the Upper 

 Provinces of India,' third edition, vol, i., p. 315. 



