The Rural Economy of India

In India the economist is lacking in appreciation of the scientific as contrasted with the commercial side of forestry and the indirect advatages of the former to the country ; while the alimportant subject of wells canals and waterways has been the monopoly of the engineer. [...] The prosperity of the peasant in the canal colonies of the Punjab in the alluvial plains of Eastern Bengal and in the coast strips in the South show what the Indian cultivator can do. [...] Such regions are to be found on mountain plateaux like those of West and Central Asia on the higher lands of the mountain valleys or of the river valleys at the edge of the plateaux where altitude makes the land unsuitable for agriculture or on the steppes of the temperate and the tundras of the colder latitudes. [...] The more fertile the land the greater the increase of population and the smaller the subdivision of the holding. [...] This attitude may be seen in every phase of his opertions—in the growing of two crops often to the detrment of the main crop—in the habit of sowing mixed crops to the despair of the statistician—in his preference for hardy if low-yielding varieties and in the land system in the distribution of the different classes of land so as to secure at least one crop in the year.