India-a Wonderland.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 7066, 11 February 1893, Page 2

India-a Wonderland.

India ia the wonderland of the empire ; and even about the dry figures of its census there is a glamour. This was well displayed by Mr J A. Baines, the Census Commissioner for India, in a lecture before the £ tatialical Society. To begin with, there is the glamour of enormity. The total population of India to-day is well over three hundred millions, and its increase during the last ten years is eqnal to the population of Italy. As many inhabitants as constitute a great European Power are the surplus of births over deaths in ovsry decade of Indian life. If one desirous to parallel by population the million and a half square miles of India one must proceed somewhat as follows : the United States roughly equal Bengal j Germany may be set off oga nat the North-west provinces ; France matches Madras; Spain, Portugal, and Greece put together are on a level with the Punjab ; the United Kingdom may measure itself against Lower Burma, and ysb there are vast portions of the map of India unallotted in the the comparison. This collossal size is almost beyond one’s mental grasp, but the interest of Mr Blaines’s Indian statistics by no means begins and ends with . their dimensions. In the Western world emigration is one of the greatest and most significant of national and international factors : there is a constant movement of people about their own countries and to ether lands, and governments are constantly occupied with legislation to induce or prevent this, according to their own needs and the characters of the moving population. In India, on the contrary, there is practically no migration at all. Ninety-sis people out of every hundred were registered by the last census in or close to the places where they were born. With us, again, most people live in cities ; in India they live in the country. In England fifty-throe per cent of the population was ’ shown by the last census to be “urban”; in India only four and three quarters per cent. After this we are not surprised to learn that two-thirds of the population of India Jive by agriculture. India, too, is a land of extremes. Of two places north of the tropics one will have a yearly rainfall of 600 inches and the other of five inches; the average density of population is 184 to the square mile, yet there are thirty-eiz and a half millions of people who live at the rate of 960 to the square mile. In only one district of the whole continent has there been a decrease of population during the last ten years—the little province of Coorg. Mr Baines follows the example of all Indian authorities in urging upon us that the phrase the millions of India isasensa(ional one, only suited to the special pleader. India is not a unit in any conceivable ethnical respect, and the officers administering the 246 districts of 4,000 square miles each into which it is divided for purposes of government have seldom identical problems to solve. A welcome feature of the latest census is that it showed the absence of any great wave of either epidemic or famine ; and, in spite of the almost appaling yearly increase of the native races, Mr Baines still reaches an optimistic conclusion upon the old-world question of population and the means of subsistence. “ India,” he declares, “is not overpeopled ; and even in the favourable circumstances of the last ten years, the population has not increased in an undue proportion to the means of subsistence ; whilst the rates of increase in its powers of production and purchase indicate a general rite in the wellbeing of the community at large."