INDIA’S IDLE WEALTH

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 974, 17 May 1930, Page 30

INDIA’S IDLE WEALTH

HUGE HIDDEN HOARDS ENORMOUS TREASURES The poverty of India has long been a commonplace of Nationalist agitation. The wealth of India is less frequently touched upon, by Congress speakers at all events; but every now and then some man of business, frequently a British merchant, arises and points to the enormous treasures ttyat lie “perdu” in this peninsula, says an exchange. Twenty-five years ago the late Lord Cable led a campaign with a view to the recovery of these riches. Nothing came of it. Now Mr. E. L. Price, a well-known Karachi merchant, giving evidence before the Bombay Provincial Banking Inquiry Committee, stresses the economic loss entailed to India by the prevalence of the hoarding habit. Mr. Price attributes the habit to social and religious customs, rnd volunteers the opinion that “if those treasures were released their magnitude would convulse the world and money invested with banks would greatly strengthen prices.”

Mr. Price considers that the religious scruples of with regard to the earning of interest tend greatly to foster the hoarding habit. But the Moslems are after all a minority in India, and it will doubtless be found that the greatest exponents of the hoarding habit are the Hindus, with whom caution rather than relig ious scruples will be found the dominant motive. And a partial explanation of the cautious habits of the Hindus may possibly be discovered in the centuries of the Mohammedan ascendency. Private Hoards In any case the trouble in India (as the Calcutta "Statesman” points out in a leading article on the subject) as in many other countries—moie so in India perhaps than elsewhere —would seem to be not that she is lacking in wealth but that her wealth is imperfectly distributed. Visitors to Indian States are frequently struck with lavish displays of riches on the part of the rulers. During the two great Durbars held at Delhi in the present century the great Princes competed against one another in an orgy- of magnificence. One doubts whether any gathering in European history could have compared with these two occasions, not even the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

In an interesting paper recently contributed to the Economic Journal, Mr. G. Findlay Shirras, formerly Dir-ector-General of Statistics in India, gives facts and figures which help to on understanding of the tendency. “A high political officer in a large Indian State, writing in July, 1923, told me,” he says, “that the ruler’s private hoard in coin and bullion was not less than Rs. 100,000,000, or ten crores.” The ruler had his jewellery valued pri-

vately and its value was not less than R 5.200,000,000, or 200 crores. One doe 3 not gather that this wealthy Prince rules over one of the greatest of the States, and if that is so one can only conjecture what the private treasuries of some of the leading Princes contain.

“In a Rajputana State,” proceeds J>lr. Shirras, “apart from R 5.30,000,000, or Rs. 3 crores in coin and bullion there vas at that time a private treasury containing R 5.200,000,000, or Rs. 2 crore. In tSaroda jewellery worth ltc. 20,000,000, or. Rs.2 crores is on show to the public and it may be presumed that the jewellery not shown is quite equal in value to that figure. These, be adds, are but instances ” The Reverse Side

There is of course a reverse side to this picture of superabundant wealth and prosperity. The smaller States notoriously have much less money and jewellery to play with, and if their rulers, as frequently happens, are lured into competition with their greater fellows, or even with one another, the results are apt to be disastrous not only«to themselves but also to their subjects. Nevertheless these striking figures bear out the contention that “'the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind” is no figment of the imagination, but is a solid fact.

Apart from the Indian States there are probably many more millionaires in British India than in America, and they are all or nearly all Indian. But these fortunes, enormous as they are in the aggregate, are unquestionably a mere fraction of the still vaster vealth which exists in the shape of gold and silver hoards, in every part of India, whether British India or the States. Many economists pray that it may continue to be hoarded, as its emergence would, in Mr. Price's phrase, “convulse the world” and reduce current values to chaos. However that may be the legend of a “povertystricken India” ought clearly to be reviewed from time to time and brought more closely into relation with the facts.