Mr. MILNE:

I will come to that in a moment. As I said, 72 per cent. of the people live on the land. The conditions of the agriculturists in India are very difficult, perhaps, for some of us to understand. The greatest drawback to the agriculturist is the land system. Division and sub-division of land has been carried to an almost incredible degree. In a recently published report—it is published by the Government of India and is public property—it is stated that the average agriculturist does not work on an acreage above three acres, that he does not work more than about 150 days in the year, that he is busy during his ploughing and during his harvest, but that for the rest of the year he has little or nothing to do. That state of affairs is caused, partly, by the tremendous sub-division of land. It would not be in order now to go into details which I could give as to divisions which I have seen, but they are almost incredible in their minuteness. There is a great attachment to the land, but that sub-division has a great deal to do with the poverty of the agriculturist.

Let us bear in mind the true proportions of the case. The agriculturist in India is not the agriculturist at home. His wants are very few. It is probably right, to say that in time his wants may be more and should be more; I do not deny that. But his wants to-day are very few. He knows very little of the amenities of life. He has, certainly, no education, or, practically, none, and, being in that condition, wants none. I do not say that that is right, but there the fact is. You cannot expect a person who has never had any education and has never seen any advantages from it to want it. The Indian agriculturist lives in a totally different country, under totally different conditions of climate, food and everything else. The most that we can hope to do in the immediate future, with the great mass of the people of India, is to try to help them gradually to get out of debt. The great curse of the Indian people is the fact that the marriage and the funeral services and all the ceremonies connected therewith are so deadly expensive, according to their standard of living. The consequence is, that you have men who were born and who have lived and died in debt. They have taken on the debt of their fathers before them; they carry it on and increase it and die in debt. They know no other conditions. That is the first move which we can make towards bringing about better conditions. It will mean the very slow spreading of education.

It is possible that the Seconder of this Motion was more concerned with the conditions in the factories of India. Only 10 per cent. of the people of India are concerned with the factories. Of course, of 320,000,000 people that is a large number, but it is a small proportion of the population. The factories question is a totally different one from that of agriculture. In the great jute mills of Calcutta and in the cotton mills of Bombay, which are the largest groups of factories, there is no settled permanent labour at all, speaking generally. The labourer who works in the factories of India is first and foremost an agriculturist. He is driven into the towns, or goes there in the hope of greater gain, and as a result he gradually becomes a townsman. But in many cases he remains a countryman. At some period or other in the year he goes back to his native village, tills his own bit of soil, and still retains an interest in his own plot of land. That puts him in a category totally different from that of the factory worker in this country.

I am not going to suggest that, compared with English workers, the factory worker in India is as well off, because any such comparison is ridiculous. I am not even going to suggest that the factory worker in India should not be much better off under Indian conditions than he is, but let us look at the facts as they stand. The hon. Gentleman who seconded the Motion spoke of a lowering of the standard. It is not the case that the standard has gone down at all. The standard has gone up very considerably, as is proved by the Government publications which are accessible to all Members of the House. The fact of the matter is that since pre-War days the standard of wages in India has gone up, and the real wages have gone up by over 17 per cent. Of course, the cost of living has gone up, along with the wages, but the wages have gone up higher, making a real gain of 17 per cent., which is material. To-day, a weaver in a Bombay mill earns from 40 to 70 rupees a month. Hon. Members may take it that these figures are quoted officially. I admit that is not a very large sum. Of that sum he spends roughly 52 per cent. in food, because food has gone down considerably in India in the last year or two. Strangely enough, that is almost exactly the same proportion as is spent on food by the worker in this country.

In the case of clothes, perhaps naturally, the worker in India spends considerably less. Reference has been made to these people being in rags. I do not for a moment suggest that they should remain in rags and I think it very desirable that they should be properly clothed, but I ask hon. Members to recollect that the climatic conditions are somewhat different, and I do not think there would be any great expenditure on clothing above what is carried on at the present time, oven if the wages were raised very considerably. There is this further curious fact that in housing, the Indian worker spends almost exactly the same proportion as the English worker. The housing conditions are very bad indeed. The housing conditions in Bombay, as I very well know, have constituted one of the greatest problems which the Bombay Government have had to face in the last 30 or 40 years, but very great works are being carried out in that connection, and the Development Directorate, the Improvement Trust and the Municipality hope by 1929 to have erected chawls or tenements for 200,000 workers, which is one-sixth of the total population of the city.

In the case of the Bombay Port Trust, who employ something like 11,000 workmen, they have provided housing for nearly half that number, so that there is a great movement going on. The mill owners have also done a great deal to help the solution of the problem. The housing conditions are extremely bad, owing to the congested nature of the island on which these great factories have been built up. This great problem can only be dealt with on a huge scale, but it is now being dealt with in more than one direction. In the Report recently submitted by the Government, there is the curious, though perfectly correct, statement that an increase in wages does not necessarily mean greater efficiency. Strangely enough in India, possibly for want of education, there is no desire to save, and there is no particular desire to do any more work than is absolutely necessary—a desire which I admit is shared in other lands. The consequence is that where you have increased payment at present very often you have a condition in which the workmen will only work for four instead of six days and idle the rest. It is usually said that the art of living in idleness is very difficult to acquire, but I think I am not exaggerating when I say that the Indian native has not so far found any difficulty in acquiring it. He has not been trained to work in the same way as the workman at home, and the consequence is one finds that during a working day in the factory there is a great deal of time for various reasons spent outside the actual workshop.

In addition, there is a great deal of absenteeism, the last figures being 17 per cent., which is a very large figure. That is no doubt caused by climatic conditions in which the work is carried on, and to some extent by the want of training. But if we compare these conditions with those of a country like Japan, we find that the workman in India is better paid, that there is much less female labour employed in India, and that his hours of work are much shorter in India. The hours of work are laid down under the Factory Act as 60 per week, and a holiday must occur within every 10 days. These hours are longer than at home, but it is interesting to note that in a Report just published at Simla on the working of the Factory Act, it is stated that a large number of factories are only working 48 hours a week, and in the case of children, whose hours are limited to 36 hours a week, many are only working 36 hours a week. Conditions are gradually improving. The next point which I bring to the notice of the House is that the factory worker is not so efficient as the worker in Great Britain, and cannot hope to be, although perhaps he will be in 100 years. In India one male weaver in a cotton mill minds two looms, while a girl in Lancashire will mind six. It will be found—and this fact was quoted by an Indian who was a colleague of the hon. Members opposite in the last Parliament—that the ratio is something like 2½ to 1 or, in other words, 2½ people are required in India to do the work which one person does in this country.

It is a totally different standard, and I only point out these facts to show that we cannot possibly compare conditions in Lancashire or Dundee with conditions in Bombay and Calcutta. The condition of the worker, if we compare his income and expenditure on the essentials of life, is not so materially worse than the condition of the workman in other countries. It is no use comparing the £ with the rupee, or the earnings in this country with the earnings in India. It is a truism that wealth is not what you have in token money, but what the money will buy, and the Indian worker's expenditure pro rata on essentials compares not unfavourably with this country and France, and I do not think they are so very much below the conditions of the worker here. I do not mean to suggest by that that their conditions should not be improved. I now desire, to say a word on the question of mines. I am not as well acquainted with the mining position in India as the factory conditions, but I know something of mining, and I have here an extract from a report published in Simla by the official who is, I think, termed the Mining Superintendent under the Government of India. He states that in the United Kingdom, in 1921, the death rate per 1,000 was 1.36 among people, employed underground. The corresponding Indian rate was 1.46. This is the point where I entirely agree with my hon. Friend opposite. He proceeds: But per million tons raised it was 11.50 in India compared with 5.19 in the United Kingdom. Then he goes on to say: It is estimated that about one-third of the accidents in India are caused by the fault of the people injured and only 9 per cent. due to the fault of the management of the mines. The Indian suffers from his stupidity. It is natural it should be so if you realise that those people have not been trained to mining from their childhood. Very often it is imported labour; above ground labour in many cases. They go into the mines knowing very little about them, and are in a different category from the highly trained people of this country. There is the greatest necessity for increasing the safeguards that can be taken. It is well to realise that there are great difficulties owing to the fact that the people themselves are entirely unacquainted with mining in many cases. This Resolution is to associate with the conditions described to-day a desire for an extension of the franchise, presumably with the idea that, if you extend the franchise, these conditions will improve. Is there any ground for that belief? It is not that I oppose an extension of the franchise, but it is useless to suggest that the people of India are in the position in which we can give them widespread franchise. The franchise to-day in India is a mere flea-bite. There are 6,000,000 voters out of 319,000,000, but as far as the property qualification goes it is not very I high, about £2 per annum. It is rather interesting to notice that this very question of the representation of the wage earners was dealt with by a Committee of the Government of India. I wish to refer to only one part of their Report. They decided that it was useless to go on extending the franchise to the wage earners, immediately at any rate— In arriving at this decision I share the belief of the Government of India that the steady rise in prosperity of manual workers in India, and the rapid improvement of their housing conditions, will automatically and without undue delay result in qualifying the great majority of their numbers for the ordinary vote in the ordinary constituencies. No other solution than this could be regarded as satisfactory.