CHANGES IN INDIA

Taranaki Daily News, 8 October 1928, Page 13

CHANGES IN INDIA

GROWTH OF CO-OPERATION BUBAL FINANCE SCHEMES. UPLIFTING THE OUTCASTS. Rural India, which until lately led much the same life as it did a thousand years ago, now is the scene of great and rapid changes. Some account of the so-called mass-movements in South India was given in an interview on Saturday by the Rev. H. W. Whyte, of the London Missionary Society, who has spent the past 20 years in that region, and is now visiting Auckland. Lately most of Mr. Whyte’s work has been on the educational and economic oide, and more particularly has been concerned with fostering the co-operative movement among the cultivators. The whole purpose of the movement, which had all possible approval and help from the Government, he said, was to encourage the natives in their villages to help each other, and to free them from the grip of the moneylender, whose exactions in the past had greatly hampered the development of agriculture and industry. The native landholder, be he large or small, had a strange and incurable penchant for getting into debt, quite apart from his genuine need of credit, particularly in bad seasons. Under the system of rural finance, he could now obtain from a central bank, through a local organisation, advances against crops at a reasonable rate of interest, and the results were good. The capital was mainly subscribed by private native shareholders. Unfortunately, some cultivators were content at present to take advantage of this branch of the co-op-erative movement without attempting any real co-operation with their neighbours. ENCOURAGING INDUSTRIES. Much was being done to encourage village industries. The old hand loom was still being used, and had not been ousted by modern machinery. The same, however, was not true of spinning. Most of the hand weaving was done with machine-spun thread. A simple attachment enabled a flying shuttle to be used on the old type of loom, and as the result of demonstrations it was now widely used, increasing the output several times over.

A genuine effort was being made in South India to put the outcast or "untouchable'’ class on a better economic footing. These people subsisted by casual labour, but various schemes were being carried out to obtain areas of waste and unused land near the villages in which they lived, and to give them facilities for raising crops on their own account.

This is not to say that the caste system was breaking down, although Gandhi had condemned it, and there were some signs that it was weakening. It was p-obable that even if caste were abolished social distinction- would remain. The Brahmin, by tradition, education and mental endowments, held a place in the community which could not quickly be filled by others. So far as the peasant and the outcast were concerned, neither the Government nor the missions attempted to give them education that they could not absorb. The aim of Hth was to guide and help them in the conduct of every-day affairs.

The outcasts constituted a great responsibility upon the missions. Practically all of them claimed to be Christians, for the reason that all the native faiths disavowed them. The missionaries were now doing their best to make them from nominal into instructed Christians. With the exception of the Roman Catholic Church, which had a large organisation of its own, the missions had combined in a friendly a - angement to divide the territory and avoid overlapping. Mr. Whyte’s organisation worked mainly through native teachers, supervised by native ministers.

Speaking of Government administration, Mr. Whyte said the sudden increase in the number of native officials replacing Europeans had had some bad ef'eets, but the process was inevitable. He had generally found that a district deteriorated after being placed under the control of a native. Some such officials were rea’’y able men, but others proved to be misfits. Everything was in a state of change, and some troubles am difficulties were only to be expected. The natives in the villages had a general desire for home rule, although it was doubtful if many of them knew exactly what they meant by the term. They were much more interested in political affairs than their forefathers, for vernacular newspapers circulated everywhere. In South India there was far less active political agitation than in the north, especially Bengal. One reason was that religious strife was not prevalent, the Mohammedans not being a large or powerful part of the population.