ROYAL COMMISSION ON AGRICULTURE

Royal Commission on Agriculture summarises the causes of city-ward migration in the following words :
"Emigration has always arisen mainly from the difficulty of finding an adequate livelihood in one's native place, and this is the predominant force which impels the Indian villagers to seek industrial employment. Over large parts of India, the number of persons on the land is much greater than the number to cultivate it and appreciably in excess of the number it can comfortably support. In most areas, pressure on the land has been increasing steadily for a long time and a rise in the general standard of living has made this pressure more acutely felt. These has always been a substantial class of landless labourers earning a meagre living in good seasons and apt to be reduced to penury in bad ones. The loss of land through indebtedness, the need or desire of a landlord to increase his own cultivation, quarrels, the death of title holder and other causes, bring fresh recruits to this class. Among those who retain tenancies, various changes may operate to render a holding insufficient for those dependent on it. An increase in the number of members of the family, a rise in rent, the growth of debt, all contribute to force the agricultural worker to abandon his ancestral occuption.... It must not be supposed that the economic pressure which drives the villager to the city is confined to those engaged in agriculture. The village craftsman, working formerly within an isolated economic unit, finds himself, by the improvement of communications and the growth of industry, subjected to competition from the larger workd. The textile mills have many weavers drawn from families that, for generations previously, worked at handlooms ; the village worker in hides and leather, the carpenter and the blacksmith are all being subjected to pressure from the factory. In many cases the easiest, perhaps the only, way out of the rival which is supplanting him."