June, 1912. J 



547 



Miscellaneous. 



DIFFICULTIES IN THE IMPROVE- 

 MENT OF INDIAN AGRICULTURE. 



By M. E. Couchman, I.C.S., 

 Director of Agriculture, Madras; 



(From the Agricultural Journal of 

 India, Vol. VI., Pt. Ill, July, 1911.) 



At the Sixth Annual Session ot the 

 South India Association, Madras, Mr. M. 

 E. Couchman, I.C.S., Director of Agri- 

 culture, Madras, read a paper on " Diffi- 

 culties in the Improvement of Indian 

 Agriculture." He said : — 



"The object ot this paper is to allay 

 the impatience which finds occasional 

 expression that more rapid progress is 

 not being made in the improvement of 

 Indian Agriculture. This criticism comes 

 from the educated classes. The general 

 attitude ot the Agricultural classes 

 towards the department is still that of 

 the land-holders of another province, 

 who, when summoned to meet the head 

 of the province in conference and asked 

 what their wants were in Agricultural 

 matters, replied more land, more water, 

 and to be left alone by the Government. 



" I have therefore, taken advantage of 

 your invitation to place before you as the 

 representatives of the educated classes 

 of Madras some of the reasons why 

 progress in the introduction of agricul- 

 tural improvements must always be 

 slow and especially so in India. 



" In doing this, I shall not dwell upon 

 the ordinary administrative difficulties 

 which impede all branches of Indian ad- 

 ministration and especially those who 

 seek zo remove long-standing prejudices 

 or to change old customs and have to 

 rely only on persuasion to achieve their 

 objects. You are familiar with all these 

 difficulties. You know the dislike and 

 suspicion ot official interference which 

 are still so strong in the villages. The 

 Tamil proverb that a village which is 

 often visited by the king will never 

 prosper, is still representative of the 

 ideas of the average villager. It is easy 

 to make too much of these difficulties ; 

 although we have but a very small 

 establishment as yet, we find that a 

 properly trained and sympathetic sub* 



ordinate who really knows his business 

 can, without very much difficulty, gain 

 the ear of the cultivating classes and 

 persuade them to try our suggestion, 

 provided he has some real improvement 

 to recommend to them. The difficulties 

 which I shall try to describe to-day are 

 those of general application fundament- 

 al to the subject. 



''In Tolstoi's great book, Anna Kare- 

 nina, there is a vivid description of the 

 various hindrances that an educated 

 man meets with when he tries to in- 

 fluence his tenants to adopt what seem 

 to him more up-to-date methods of agri- 

 culture. 



" Constantin Levin bought a hay-mak- 

 ing machine. The man who drove it 

 disliked the long arms of the machine 

 waving over his head and took steps to 

 put it out of order. He bought English 

 ploughs but his peasants broke them 

 because they were too lazy to lift them 

 up when turning at the end of the fur- 

 row. He imported English cattle but 

 they were suffered to die for want of 

 ordinary attention. He set apart a 

 portion ot a field for seed, but his men 

 cut this before it was ripe, because it 

 was the easiest to cut. In another of 

 his books Tolstoi lays his finger on the 

 right place, when he says that an agri- 

 cultural reformer must first study the 

 mind of the peasant, because this is the 

 most important of all agricultural condi- 

 tions, and it is this which we must study 

 before we consider the other elements of 

 the problem. 



" Superficial observers in all countries 

 are in the habit of deriding the farming 

 classes as ignorant and obstinate, blindly 

 follovviug the obsolete practices of their 

 forefathers and inasmuch as farmers 

 seldom write books, judgment goes 

 against them by default : I should like 

 you to consider for a moment why it is 

 that farmers as a class are more conser- 

 vative than the rest of the world and 

 whether they are wrong in being so. 



"A farmer is brought upon the land 

 from his earliest days. Year after year 

 he witnesses the same majestic proces- 

 sion of the seasons. The same crops are 



