PROGRESS IN INDIA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 August 1941, Page 6

PROGRESS IN INDIA

EXTENDING CO-OPERATION. “There has been an enormous growth of population in India,” said Mr Wedgwood, M.P., speaking in the House of Commons, “an increase of 50,000,000 in ten years—which is unique in the whole world, and that is being far outmatched by the growth in wealth. It is concealed today, largely .owing to the fixing in the price of the rupee, but there is no doubt of the increase of prosperity in many parts of India. They are getting away from agriculture, and are becoming an industrial country. That movement is being enormously -accelerated by the

war. India forms the sole source of supply for our armies in the East; she is becoming the sole source of supply for a great part of Asia. She is becoming a vast industrial country. Whereas when this war began the Indian people owed Great Britain untold millions, when this war ends we shall be owing them untold millions. That is a revolution which is surely taking place every day. Everything is being done now to teach the Indian peoples to become mechanics. They are extraordinarily apt learners. Anyone who has been in the African colonies knows that all

the railways and machine shops are run by Indians. They have now got the capital, which we in this country have I I not got, in order to develop their industries, and I have not the slightest! doubt that, whatever happens about self-government or about the course of the war, India will increase its importance, relative not )mly to Britain, but to the whole world; it will increase its wealth, and at the same time it will increase its liberal spirit of democratic home rule.” 1