SECTION F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 



PLANTATION ECONOMY 



ADDRESS BY 



C. R. FAY, M.A., D.Sc, 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 



i. The Nature of Plantation Agriculture. 



The Royal Commission on Agriculture in India of 1928 in its brief 

 notice of plantations remarks on their importance to the export agriculture 

 of India. ' The three main planters' crops are tea, coffee and rubber, 

 but sugar-cane is important in Bihar as are spices in the South of India. 

 The area under indigo in Bihar, where it was formerly the principal 

 planters' crop, is now negligible. The total area under tea, coffee, rubber 

 and indigo in 1925-26 was 1,169,000 acres, of which 982,000 acres were 

 in British India ... A little cinchona is also grown by planters. The 

 value of their crops is out of all proportion to their acreage. In 1926-27 

 the value of the total exports, including spices, amounted to Rs. 34.59 

 crores or about 18 per cent, of the value of all agricultural products 

 exported. By far the greater part of this was accounted for by tea, the 

 value of the exports of which amounted to Rs.29.06 crores.' (Report, 

 p. 597.) A crore is 10,000,000 and a lakh is 100,000, of persons, things, 

 or money : and the present value of the rupee is is. 6d. The Commission 

 appends plantations to its chapter on horticulture as a special type of 

 intensive agriculture, and it does not even raise the question whether the 

 staples of agriculture such as cotton and wheat in the years to come may 

 adopt the plantation system and thus cause Indian agriculture to exhibit 

 a structure which would resemble outwardly the collective farms of Soviet 

 Russia. 



The Royal Commission on Labour in India of 1931 has four chapters 

 on plantations, dealing respectively with general survey, recruitment of 

 labour, wages, health and welfare. It studies them as a distinctive and 

 important section of wage labour in a country where factory employment 

 is relatively rare ; and it defines the system succinctly thus : ' The 

 plantation system connotes the acquisition of a limited but fairly extensive 

 area for the cultivation of a particular crop, the actual cultivation being 

 done under the direct supervision of a manager, who in some cases may 

 himself be the actual proprietor. A considerable number of persons (the 

 number may run as high as 4,000) are employed under his control in the 

 same way as the factory workers are under the control of the factory 

 manager, but there is one important difference in that the work is 



