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The Case for India by Annie Wood Besant
page 58 of 62 (93%)
head, and according to non-official estimates, only a little
more than £1 per head. Your imports per head are about £13:
ours about 5s. per head. The total deposits in your Postal
Savings Bank amount to 148 million sterling, and you have in
addition in the Trustees' Savings Banks about 52 million
sterling. Our Postal Savings Bank deposits, with a population
seven times as large as yours, are only about 7 million
sterling, and even of this a little over one-tenth is held by
Europeans. Your total paid-up capital of joint-stock companies
is about 1,900 million sterling. Ours is not quite 26 million
sterling, and the greater part of this again is European.
Four-fifths of our people are dependent upon agriculture, and
agriculture has been for some time steadily deteriorating.
Indian agriculturists are too poor, and are, moreover, too
heavily indebted, to be able to apply any capital to land, and
the result is that over the greater part of India agriculture
is, as Sir James Caird pointed out more than twenty-five years
ago, only a process of exhaustion of the soil. The yield per
acre is steadily diminishing, being now only about 8 to 9
bushels an acre against about 30 bushels here in England.

In all the matters which come under Gokhale's first test, the
Bureaucracy has been and is inefficient.

Give Indians a Chance.

All we say in the matter is: You have not succeeded in bringing
education, health, prosperity, to the masses of the people. Is it not
time to give Indians a chance of doing, for their own country, work
similar to that which Japan and other nations have done for theirs?
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