March ii, 1886] 



NATURE 



443 



on the pait of the settlement officers to improve the field 

 survey and construct good maps ; but it has been 

 attended witli varying success, indiflerent at best ; for 

 though a theoretical knowledge of the first principles of 

 surveying, which are very simple, is readily acquired, a 

 practical knowledge of their application in the combina- 

 tion of a vast number of mutually interdependent mea- 

 sures, with all the desirable accuracy, is not so easy to 

 acquire ; it needs much skill and judicious organisation ; 

 the ground measurements are necessarily made by the 

 cheapest agency procurable ; many measurers have to be 

 employed simultaneously, and they have to be systematic- 

 ally supervised in order to guard against both accidental 

 mistakes and intentional falsifications. Thus in the 

 Bengal Presidency the Survey Department has long been 

 called on to co-operate with the settlement officers to 

 some extent. All village or parish boundaries have been 

 carefully surveyed, and plane-table sketches of the 

 interior have been made, distinguishing the cultivated 

 from the uncultivated lands ; and the areas of the entire 

 village, the cultivation, and the waste thus determined 

 have been employed as a check on the gross areas 

 derived from the field measurements of the settlement 

 officers. The results thus obtained were long considered 

 sufficient for practical purposes, though the maps were 

 still far from accurate, for it was merely the areas that 

 were checked, not the mapping of the fields and 

 boundaries of property. But as the country grows in 

 wealth and civilisation, the want of accurate cadastral 

 maps is more and more felt ; and the question has arisen, 

 How are they to be obtained in the future ? whether 

 wholly by the Professional Survey, or by the Settlement 

 Department, as formerly, but with greater assistance from 

 the surveyors, by getting the latter to subdivide the 

 village area into several accurately-outlined blocks, each 

 no greater than the field-measurers can be e.\pected to 

 fill in with accuracy ? The merits of the two rival systems 

 are hotly contested ; the Governments of the Punjab and 

 the Central Provinces have declared in favour of the 

 modified settlement system, whole those of the North- 

 West Provinces and Burmah are in favour of the pro- 

 fessional survey ; and the surveyors and the settlement 

 officers are each declared by their respective backers to 

 be the fittest to survive in what has come to be regarded, 

 in some quarters, as a struggle for existence. 



There are three essential requirements for administra- 

 tive purposes, a correct map, a classification of soils, and 

 a record of individual rights, and at first sight it would 

 seem desirable to have each of these performed by a 

 separate class of experts. Thus, when the professional 

 surveyors were called on to undertake the field measure- 

 ments, it was intended that they should simply make a 

 survey of the ground, and leave the business of classi- 

 fication and recording rights to others ; but, though 

 in most instances this would have sufficed to secure what 

 was wanted, in very many it would have failed to do so, 

 because several boundaries of property are either quite 

 unmarked on the ground, or so faintly marked that they 

 must be specially pointed out to the surveyor ; while, on 

 the other hand, many prominently-marked divisions of 

 land are not boundaries of property. If, then, the sur- 

 veyor simply made a survey of what he saw, assigning a 

 number to each plot of land on his map for ready identifi- 

 cation, the settlement officer following him had sometimes 

 to break up, sometimes to combine, his plots, and institute 

 a new series of numbers for the record of rights, all 

 which caused trouble, expense, and delay, and might 

 necessitate the construction of a second map. Thus, it 

 was found that the surveyor had to survey not what he 

 saw, but what was wanted by the settlement officer, and 

 this necessitated his entering into communication with all 

 the landed proprietors and tenants and squatters. 



Now in India and Asiatic countries generally there is 

 this standing objection to any invasion of a district by 



Government officials, more particularly when made with 

 a view to inquiries about rights of proprietorship and 

 occupancy, that the inhabitants invariably consider it a 

 judicious precaution in their own interests to conciliate 

 the officials and win their favour by substantial presents, 

 even when they have no rival claimants to fear, and when 

 they have, the conciliatory gifts are liable to merge into 

 bribes of ruinous magnitude. Thus every district is in- 

 variably impoverished more or less by the passage over 

 it, and still more the protracted residence in it, of a body 

 of native officials, and the less it is subjected to such 

 invasions the better for its welfare. In this respect there 

 is a decided advantage in having the survey, the classifi- 

 cation, and the record of rights executed simultaneously 

 by the officials of a single department working under a 

 single officer ; and there is the further advantage that the 

 presence of the villagers in attendance on the officials is 

 required much less frequently when all three investiga- 

 tions are made simultaneously than when each is con- 

 ducted separately. Thus in some of the districts in which 

 cadastral operations are now being carried on, the survey 

 officers have been called on to undertake, in addition to 

 their ordinary duties, the classification of soils and the 

 entr\- of all undisputed items in the record of rights, and 

 to furnish a hst of all disputed items, with the requisite 

 information to enable the disputes to be settled either by 

 an officer specially appointed to do so, or by one of the 

 higher courts of justice. This new system has not been 

 long on trial, but it is expected to be very satisfactory in 

 being less costly to the Government and less oppressive 

 on the people of the country. The Survey Department 

 has the great advantage of a staft' of European subor- 

 dinates to control the accuracy of the field measurements ; 

 its system of operation is cheap native agency closely 

 supervised ; its officers can control the classification of 

 soils and the preparation of the record of rights as well 

 as the ground measurements ; and close supervision is a 

 sine qua non wherever subordinate native agency is 

 largely employed. 



the question of the best system of cadastral survey is 

 one of especial importance at the present tmie, for the 

 Government of Bengal contemplates carrying out such a 

 survev in the districts which were permanently settled by 

 Lord' Corn waUis in 1792. When that settlement was 

 effected the Government ceased to have any direct 

 interest in the land so long as the annual payments of 

 revenue were made with punctuality. The land has 

 greatly increased in value, and the lightly assessed 

 revenue has been paid with ease and without demur ; but 

 meanwhile great changes have taken place in proprietary 

 rio-hts, and of these there is little official record ; lands 

 have changed hands, and the settlements of zamindars 

 with ryots° or landlords with tenants, have not by any 

 means'been of the permanent and easy nature of the one 

 made by the Government with the landlords ; on the 

 contrarvj rents have been raised to the utmost, and dis- 

 putes between the zamindars and the ryots are constantly 

 cominc- before our Law Courts, which have no record of 

 ri^fbts and no map to guide them to a correct decision. 

 When the permanent settlement was effected, nearly a 

 centurv ago, it was provided that a " patwari," or village 

 accountant, should be maintained to keep the record of 

 ric^hts and correct it up to date on all occasions of sub- 

 di"vision or clubbing of land ; but no steps were taken to 

 carry out this provision, and in Bengal the " patwari " has 

 lonCT become extinct, doubtless to the great advantage of 

 the°rich and the strong over the poor and the weak. And 

 now the former arecrving out that they do not want a 

 survey, while the latter have not as yet commenced to ask 

 for what they have not yet learnt to understand and 

 appreciate. But many of the higher officials of Govern- 

 ment think it imperatively necessary for the just adminis- 

 tration of the country. 



One of these officers maintains that there can hardly 



