India, Old and New

by Sir Valentine Chirol

If the war has wrought great changes in the political life of India, in its status within the Empire and in its constitutional relations with the United Kingdom, it has produced equally important changes in its economic situation and outlook. The Montagu-Chelmsford Report had not failed to note how largely economic factors entered into the political situation which the Secretary of State and the Viceroy were primarily concerned to study. India is, and probably must always remain, essentially an agricultural country, and its economics must always suffer from the exceptionally unstable conditions to which, except within the relatively small areas available for irrigation, dependence upon a precarious rainfall condemns even the most industrious agricultural population. Many circumstances had combined to retard the development of its vast natural resources and the growth of modern manufacturing industries. Few British administrators during the last half-century had realised their importance as Lord Dalhousie had done before the Mutiny, until Lord Curzon created a special department of commerce and industry in the Government of India. The politically minded classes, whose education had not trained them to deal with such questions, were apt to lose themselves in such blind alleys as the "doctrine of drain." But as they perceived how largely dependent India was on foreign countries for manufactured goods, whilst her own domestic industries had been to a great extent crushed in hopeless competition with the products of the much more highly organised and equipped industries of European countries, they rushed to the conclusion that an industrial revival might be promoted by a crude boycott of foreign imported goods which would at the same time serve as a manifestation of their political discontent. The Swadeshi movement failed, as it was bound to fail. But failure intensified the suspicion that, as India's foreign trade was chiefly with the United Kingdom, her industrial backwardness was deliberately encouraged in the interests of British manufactures, and it was not altogether unjustified by the maintenance of the excise duty on locally manufactured cotton goods, which protected the interests of Lancashire in the one industrial field in which Indian enterprise had achieved greatest success. The introduction of an annual Industrial Conference in connection with the Indian National Congress was the first organised attempt of the politically minded classes to link up with politics a movement towards industrial independence. It assumed increased bitterness with the disastrous failures of Indian banks started on "national" lines in Bombay and the Punjab. The cry for fiscal freedom and protection grew widespread and insistent before the war broke out. Then, under the pressure of war necessities, the Government of India explored, as it had never done before, the whole field of India's natural resources and of the development of Indian industries. At the same time an opportunity arose for a group of Indian "merchant-venturers"—to use the term in its fine old Elizabethan sense—who had set themselves to give the lead to their countrymen, to show what Indian enterprise was capable of achieving. What it has already achieved deserves to be studied as the most pregnant illustration of what the future may hold in reserve.

It is a somewhat chastening reflection that the creation of the one great metallurgical industry in India has been due not to British but to Indian capital and enterprise, assisted in the earliest and most critical stages not by British but by American skill, and that, had it not been created when it was, our Syrian and Mesopotamian campaigns could never have been fought to their victorious issue, as Jamsheedpur produced and could alone at that juncture supply the rails for the construction of the railways essential to the rapid success of those great military operations. Equally chastening is the reflection that from its very inception less than twenty years ago, the pioneers of this vast undertaking had constantly to reckon with the indifference and inertia of Anglo-Indian officialdom, and with the almost solitary exceptions of Sir Thomas Holland, then at the head of the Geological Survey, and Sir Benjamin Robertson, afterwards Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces where the first but unavailing explorations were made, seldom received more than a minimum of countenance and assistance. Not till Messrs. Tata's American prospectors had explored this region did the Government of India realise that untold mineral wealth lay there within 150 miles of Calcutta, almost on the surface of the soil, and not until the pressure of the Great War and the inability of India to draw any longer upon British industry for the most vital supplies compelled them to turn to Jamsheedpur do they seem to have at all appreciated what an enterprise that owed little or nothing to them meant to India and the Empire. When the war was over, Lord Chelmsford paid a visit to Jamsheedpur and generously acknowledged that debt. "I can hardly imagine," said the Viceroy, "what we should have done if the Tata Company had not been able to give us steel rails which have provided not only for Mesopotamia, but for Egypt, Palestine, and East Africa." One may therefore hope that the lesson of the war will not be forgotten, and that Sir Thomas Holland, who has now exchanged the Munitions Board for the portfolio of Industry, will prevent a relapse into the old traditions of aloofness now that the war pressure is over.

The cotton-mills of Bombay, the jute-mills of Calcutta, the goldfields of Mysore each contribute their own remarkable chapter to the story of British industrial enterprise in India, but none can compare in point of romance with the story of the iron and steel industry of Jamsheedpur. It need only be very briefly recalled. In 1902 Mr. Jamsheedji Tata, a veteran of the great Parsee community of Bombay and one of the founders of the Bombay cotton industry, visited the United States. His active mind had already for some time been busy with the idea of starting a metallurgic industry in India, and he had received in the course of conversation with Lord George Hamilton, then Secretary of State for India, about the only encouragement he ever did receive in England. He fared better in America. In New York he called with a letter of introduction from Lord Avebury on Mr. C. Page Perin, an eminent mining engineer, who was at once impressed both with his visitor and with the schemes which he unfolded, though they were still quite visionary. Mr. Perin, who is still the consulting engineer of the Tata Company, agreed to send a party of American prospectors, and followed them in 1904 to India. Long was the search and many the hardships undergone, and Mr. Jamsheedji Tata himself passed away before he could see the fulfilment of his dream. But Sir Dorab Tata proved himself not unworthy to follow in his footsteps, and when an area hitherto almost unknown and unexplored had been definitely located, combining in an extraordinary degree the primary requisites of adequate coalfields, vast ore deposits of great wealth, a sufficient water supply, a suitable site for a large industrial town with good railway communication though still badly needing development, he and a small group of his Bombay friends tried to find in London the financial support which they imagined would hardly be denied to an enterprise of such immense importance for our Indian Empire. But they failed. It was then that, largely on the advice of Sir George Clarke, now Lord Sydenham, who was then Governor of Bombay—whose great services to the economic advancement of India and to Indian technical education latter-day politicians are too apt to forget—they appealed to their own fellow-countrymen for the capital needed. Never had such an appeal been made, but the response was immediate and ample. The Tata Iron and Steel Works Company was launched as an Indian Company, and to the present day all the hard cash required has come out of Indian pockets. In 1908 the first clearance was effected in what had hitherto been a barren stretch of scrub-jungle sparsely inhabited by aboriginal Sonthals, one of the most primitive of Indian races, and in 1910 the first works, erected by an American firm, were completed and started. As far as the production of pig-iron was concerned success was immediate, but many difficulties had to be overcome in the manufacture of steel which had never before been attempted in a tropical climate. These too, however, had been surmounted by the end of 1913 in the nick of time to meet the heavy demands and immense strain of the Great War, towards the end of which Government took as much as 97 per cent of the steel output and obtained it from the Company at less than a quarter of the price that it would have commanded in the Indian open market.

To-day, just twelve years after the first stake was driven into the ground, Jamsheedpur is already a town of close on 100,000 inhabitants, pleasantly situated on rising ground between a considerable river which flows down sometimes during the rainy season in a devastating torrent from the lofty plateau of Chota Nagpur into the Bay of Bengal and a minor affluent whose waters mingle with it close by. The climate is dry and therefore healthy, though the shade temperature rises in hot weather to 116, and a finely scarped range of hills over 3500 feet high provides within easy distance the makings of a small hill station as a refuge, especially valuable for women and children, from the worst heat of the torrid season. During the "cold" weather, when the thermometer falls to between 40° and 50° at night, there can be no more delightful climate in the world. The war gave a tremendous impetus to the Company's operations and stimulated the rapid expansion of the works on a far larger scale than had ever been anticipated, until they now need not fear comparison with some of the largest and best-equipped works of the same kind in the West. No doubt is entertained as to the demand for the enormous output from such a plant. Nor is it contemplated that it will meet anything like the full needs of India, which are growing apace. Before the war India imported annually about 1,000,000 tons of steel products, of which Germany furnished a large and increasing percentage direct or through Belgium. Equally little room is there to question the continued supply of either coal or ore. The life of the coal mines which the Tata Company possess within one hundred miles of their works is estimated at two hundred years, and they form only a very small portion of the great carboniferous area known as the Gondwana measures. They produce the best coking coal in India, and though much inferior as such to most British coal mines, against this disadvantage can be set off the much greater richness of the iron ore deposits, carrying between 60 and 67 per cent of metallic iron. These non-titaniferous deposits are practically inexhaustible, and those at present used are within forty to fifty miles of Jamsheedpur. This favoured region supplies also most of the fluxes required for the manufacture of steel, and even clays for firebricks.

Of equal promise for the future prosperity of India is the force of attraction which Jamsheedpur is exercising on other kindred or subsidiary industries which are establishing themselves in large numbers, and with Indian as well as European capital behind them, throughout the same region.

To keep pace with the growth of the population which such huge and rapid extensions involve is no easy task, and the Tatas aim at making Jamsheedpur a model industrial town not unworthy of the high standard which they have reached in their works. It is to an Englishman, a son of the late Archbishop Temple, formerly in the Public Works Department, that the task has been entrusted. The Company own twenty-seven square miles of land, which is none too little for a town that already has nearly 100,000 and may in the near future have a quarter of a million inhabitants. Fortunately the lie of the land, which is undulating and rises gradually from the level of the river beds, adapts itself both to aesthetic and sanitary town-planning. There is plenty of scope for laying out round the existing nucleus a number of new and separate quarters in which suitable provision can be made for the needs of different classes of Europeans and Indians, and for applying new scientific principles which should secure for all, including especially the children, the light and air so much needed in a large industrial centre. Many, too, are the novel problems arising out of the governance of a great heterogeneous community in a town which, though within the British Indian province of Behar and Orissa, is in many respects autonomous; and to another Englishman, Mr. Gordhays, who has for the purpose retired from the Indian Civil Service, Messrs. Tata have entrusted this equally responsible task.

How soon such a vital undertaking can be Indian-run as well as Indian-owned is a question upon the answer to which the future of India in the economic sphere depends as much as upon the success or failure of the new Councils in the sphere of political advancement.

The operations of a steel and iron foundry call for high scientific attainments, grit, and the power to control large bodies of labour. In addition to these qualities others are required at Jamsheedpur to deal with the many physical and social problems which the rapid growth of a very heterogeneous population and its harmonious and healthy governance present. What augury can be drawn for the future from the results already achieved? The board of directors, with whom the ultimate responsibility rests, has always been exclusively Indian. But, being sane business men, they realised from the first that they must for some time rely on Western management, Western technical knowledge, and even to some extent on Western skilled labour. Having met with little encouragement in British official quarters in India, or in British unofficial quarters in England, they turned in the first place to America. Many Americans occupy responsible posts in the works. The erection of the first plant was committed to Americans. The Indian directors never attempted to exclude Englishmen from their employ, nor did they hesitate to have recourse to British industry when it could best supply their needs. To keep the balance even they turned before the war to Germany also. Much of the machinery was purchased from German firms, who, like the Americans and the British, sent out their own parties to set up and work the plant which they supplied. In August 1914 the Germans numbered 250. But they were soon eliminated, and their places for the most part filled by Englishmen, the smelters from Middlesbrough importing not only their fine Yorkshire physique and dialect, but their Trade Union ideas.

During the war, Government, both in Delhi and in London, were constantly pressing for an increased output, which meant a large extension of the works; and as nothing could be obtained from England or brought out except at extreme risk from submarines, large orders for new plant for the extensions now in progress had therefore to be placed in America. The total number of covenanted employees of the Company to-day is 137, of whom ninety-three are English and forty-four American, and there are in addition sixty locally employed Europeans. The number of Indians employed is about 44,500. Nearly half the population of Jamsheedpur is directly employed by the Company, and almost the whole owes its means of livelihood to it in less direct forms. It comprises Indians of many races and creeds and castes and tongues. There are Bengalees and Madrasees of the educated classes, some of them Brahmans, who are chiefly engaged in clerical, technical, and managerial work. There are rougher Pathans and Punjabee Mahomedans, as well as Sikhs, who take more readily to heavy skilled manual labour. There are artisans and small traders and shopkeepers from all parts of India, and even a few picked carpenters from China as pattern-makers. The bulk of the unskilled labour is drawn from the Sonthal aboriginal population, industrious, docile, and cheerful as a rule, but abysmally ignorant and credulous, and liable to sudden gusts of emotion and passion.

The question of the employment of Indians on the actual processes of manufacture is largely a question of technical and physical training, and it has not been lost sight of in Jamsheedpur. Schools have been started for the education of the Indian children, and though in a community still largely composed of people who are themselves young, the number of children of a school-going age is necessarily small, a secondary school under a Bengalee graduate in science, who was himself originally trained in Rabindranath Tagore's remarkable school at Bolpur, already has over 140 boys, and a training institute for higher technical studies is to follow in due course. Nor are the adult men and women neglected, for social welfare in all its aspects plays an important part in the life of Jamsheedpur.