F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS 131 



home to which they will return when they have made enough money. 

 In time the plantation becomes their home, and the return to their own 

 country is a holiday away from home rather than an escape to it. 



The problem of recruitment differs according to the area. First, 

 North India. In the Darjeeling area much of the land is too high 

 for the plains people, and the labour is derived from the voluntary 

 migration of near-by hill peoples from Nepal and Sikkim. Many 

 of these workers have lived on the estate since birth. 12 Assam was 

 the difficult district to settle. Seventy years ago it was uncultivated, and 

 nearly uninhabited, jungle. It was a rude and insecure region close to 

 the frontier of India. In the nineteenth century planters had to obtain 

 and hold their labour by a system which had many harsh features in it. 

 It was virtually a system of indentured labour with severe penal contracts 

 attached. Recruitment was prohibited in certain districts outside 

 Assam— for example, in parts of the United Provinces — and the planters 

 obtained their main labour from primitive tribes people of the Santal 

 Parganas and Chota Nagpur by methods which degenerated at times 

 into a system approaching to slavery. Even before the war this was 

 greatly changed. The penal contract had been modified, and propaganda 

 and advertisement by recruiting agencies forbidden. There has, however, 

 to be some method of recruitment, and, in the absence of organised 

 agents on the one hand or a Government system of labour exchanges on 

 the other, there grew up a highly expensive system of informal recruiting 

 by the foremen of the estate, themselves ex-workers. Under this system 

 it cost before the war Rs.200 to Rs.500 to recruit one labourer, and in 

 1930 Rs.150. The foreman (sardar) abused his position. About one- 

 half of them did not recruit a soul, and about one-third did not even 

 return themselves, according to the Royal Commission in 1931. More- 

 over, it became customary to make everyone who was returning home 

 a sardar, because that was the simplest means of assisting his return. 

 4 It is only in the case of Assam that neither the employer nor anyone else 

 can assist the labourer who is willing to migrate except by the expensive 

 and cumbersome expedient of sending down a garden sardar to sponsor the 

 recruit.' 13 The Commission therefore recommended that a recruiting body 

 representing Indian as well as European planters should be allowed to 

 open recruiting depots, and that assisted recruits should not be forwarded 

 except through these depots; while, to protect the workers on arrival, 

 a Protector of Immigrants with powers to work inside Assam should be 

 appointed. The problem is likely to diminish ; for it is computed that over 

 600,000 ex-garden labourers were settled on Government land in Assam 

 in 1 92 1, the total number of foreigners in the province attributable to the 

 tea industry being one and one-third million, i.e. one-sixth of all Assam. 

 With tea restriction and the acclimatisation of foreign-born workers to 

 Assam they will to an increasing degree find a place of retirement within 

 Assam itself. 



The position in South India is rather different. The country is newer, 



12 The Dooars, a submontane tract to the south of Darjeeling, derive their 

 labour from the same sources as Assam, but there has been no penal contract. 



13 Report of Royal Commission on Labour in India, p. 70. 



