i 3 o SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



firm will be agent for perhaps forty or fifty plantations, they may have a 

 financial interest in them, and though not technically the managers of the 

 estate they may be virtually so. They supply their estates with planters' 

 requirements and they handle the produce of the estates, selling it at the 

 auctions in Colombo or sending it to London for auction there. At the 

 auction they are present both as buyers and sellers, and if the lot of tea 

 on offer comes from one of their own estates and they want it for a 

 customer, other buyers (I was told) do not bid against them. Leading 

 agencies are : Harrison and Crossfield, James Finlay & Co. of Calcutta, 

 Carson's of Colombo, George Steuart & Co. of Colombo. The managing 

 agency is applied in India to factory industry also. But whereas 

 in factory industry the commission is usually paid on a profits basis, 

 in plantation industry it is paid on a quantity basis, calculated on purchases, 

 shipments or sales. Its penetration is, therefore, less complete here : 

 the agents manage the plantation in an indirect fashion only. 



The English and Scottish Co-operative does not employ agents. It 

 started on the coast as a merchant and then pushed inland to own and 

 manage tea estates, the produce of which it despatches to the English 

 and Scottish Wholesale Societies, who jointly own it, in Great Britain. 

 It procured its estates by the purchase both of planted and unplanted 

 land. The nucleus of its South Indian properties was bought by Sir 

 Fairless Barber, who later became the general manager. In Ceylon it 

 sent its commercial manager from the Colombo depot to take charge of 

 its estates when it acquired them there. Being structurally a buying 

 agency which has pushed inland, the English and Scottish Co-operative 

 has naturally followed other agents in developing an inward as well as 

 an outward business. Not only does it supply its estates with require- 

 ments, but it also in Calicut does a general business of import, selling to 

 wholesalers in the district. It sells where it can the products of the 

 factories of the Co-operative Wholesale Society itself, but except in 

 proprietary lines this has not been easy to develop owing to Japanese 

 competition. A similar attempt with somewhat similar results has 

 attended the efforts of the Co-operative Wholesale Society to develop 

 a reciprocal trade between itself and the dairy farmers of New Zealand. 



7. Labour Conditions. 



Where tea is grown in hilly regions or in an area that has hitherto been 

 jungle, the problem of labour is in the first instance one of recruitment 

 from a distance. It is a special case of that larger problem which we 

 call migration. Migration is of two kinds : from village life in one country 

 to village life in another, and from village life to town life inside the same 

 country. Estate labour migration comes midway between the two. 

 It is migration from one rural existence to another, but the discipline of 

 the estate is not far removed from that of the urban factory. However, 

 unlike many factories, the plantation requires the whole labour force 

 of the family, the terrain is rural and the environment is pleasant. There 

 is thus in plantation labour no marked hostility to the employment as 

 such. The workers are not thinking the whole time of the village at 



