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Hokitika Guardian, 10 July 1931, Page 4

The report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India has recently appeared, and it supplies a huge mass of information regarding India’s worker's and their industries, •which will be consulted: with interest and advantage by all concerned in Indian affairs for many years to come. In the brief abstract now made available by cable message, what strikes the reader most forcibly is the immense complexity of the industrial and social conditions of this vast country, with its enormous population. Millions and millions of wage-earners, almost wholly illiterate, divided into groups by almost infinite varieties of creeds, castes and tongues —these provide tile material for the Commission’s researches and the background for its proposals. The industrial problem in India is complicated and confused by circumstances which have no parallel in civilised communities. Multitudes of married women working with their children' by their sides, factories periodically disorganised by the departure of the wage-earn-ers to visit their native villages, millions virtually enslaved for the greater part of their lives by moneylenders charging usurious interest and leaving their victims but a. bare margin of subsistence, the relations between employer and employed modified in countless ways by local custom or tradition »--these are some of the' factors which render their solution a ■ task of ex---' treme delicacy and difficulty. The Commission seems to have made a really heroic effort to cover the vast area submitted for its inspection. For the Report discusses hours of work, equality of wages, employment of women, child labour, the safety and- health of the worker, housing, co-operation and trade unionism, and it suggests reforms of a comprehensive and farreaching character to deal with all these questions. Criticism within narrow limits of space is clearly imnossible, comments the Auckland Star, hut even this brief reference may serve to throw some light upon the appalling and almost insuperable obstacles that must lie surmounted hefore India can be regardted as a civilised country or her affairs can he administered on We stern lines.