ONE-MAN BOATS ON THE GANGES

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27065, 13 June 1953, Page 9

ONE-MAN BOATS ON THE GANGES

BULK OF RIVER’S TRADE CARRIED GENEVA. One-man boats in enormous numbers carry the bulk of trade on one of the world’s great rivers—the Ganges, in East Pakistan, says a British expert on labour conditions. The expert, Sir Wilfred Garrett, former chief inspector of factories in the United Kingdom, said recently on his return from Pakistan that shipping companies in the region frankly admit they barely touch the traffic. Sir Wilfred Garrett was in Pakistan as the head of an International Labour Organisation team which surveyed industrial and plantation labour conditions. “One evening,” he said, “just before sunset, we ran into a veritable armada of these little vessels bringing, in this case, grain down to the ports. On a river almost too wide for one bank to be seen from the other, these little craft stretched in close formation as far as the eye could see.” » In the district of Bakerganj, he said, organised transport carries less than four-tenths of 1 per cent, of the largest rice crop in East Bengal. The small boats carry the rest “So we see,” he said, “an immense industry made up of small individual units, each originating in some small creek up the river.”