1 68 Condition of Indian Agriculture. 



The foregoing statements and figures are held to warrant 

 the conclusion that apart from drought and famine Indian 

 agriculture is not in a depressed condition. Neither of the 

 periods taken for comparison above was marked by famine 

 over considerable areas. Farms are not vacant ; rents have 

 not fallen ; land has not been thrown out of cultivation ; and 

 prices of produce remain fairly stable, subject to local changes 

 of price caused by adverse or favourable seasons in particular 

 provinces. As an example of such changes it is mentioned 

 that in the Panjab, after several good harvests, the wheat 

 crop of 1894 was the heaviest within living memory, and the 

 local Government reported that the average price of wheat 

 all over the Panjab for April, 1894, was little more than half 

 the price for April, 1893. But these very low prices did not 

 last long, and no general depression of agriculture ensued. 



The great extension of railways, whereby produce can be 

 moved from province to province and to the seaboard, is 

 said to partly account for the general prosperity of Indian 

 agriculture during the past ten or fifteen years. It must be 

 remembered that India is a large country with a huge popula- 

 tion, which consumes at home the greater part of her 

 produce ; land and labour are both cheap in India, compared 

 with other countries ; and the agricultural produce of other 

 lands has never been able to compete with India's own 

 products in her home markets. The maintenance of a silver 

 currency in India may, it is believed, also have been an 

 important factor in steadying prices, and so contributing to 

 agricultural prosperity in India. If there had been a gold 

 standard of money in India, prices of produce might have 

 fallen somewhat in sympathy with gold prices in Europe. 

 The fall in price would then, it appears, have been most 

 marked as regards cotton, rice, wheat, and oil seeds, which 

 are exported or exportable ; the fall would perhaps have been 

 less marked in the case of millets, which are not exported, 

 and of jute, which India alone produces in any quantity for 

 the wants of the whole world. 



With respect to the changes in the prices of agricultural 

 staples in India during the past twenty-five or thirty years, 

 the following details are extracted from an interesting table, 



