Britain colonized India under the name British East India Company. The colony was established from a very humble beginning because it was comprised of few structures that were used to handle agricultural produce purchased from the farmers.
The British company did not alienate the lands, but imposed taxes on the farmers such that they were left with little profits. The main aim of the British company was to obtain raw materials from India and send them back to Britain for industrial use.
In fact, if Britain had not interfered with the economic activities of India, the country would have been one of the most developed nations even before she attained her independence.
Wolpert (2003) argues that unlike in other colonies that were ruled by Britain such as in Africa where they took away fertile lands, in India, colonialists changed land ownership system and transformed it in such a way that it was permanently owned; previously, it was owned under tenure.
This new land ownership system was an initiative of the then senior administrator lord Cornwallis. The taxes that were imposed on farmers were very heavy which made them to continue living in extreme poverty whereas there lifestyles were expected to improve.
This was because the British traders purchased their farm produce at very low prices, which was not fare, compared to the taxes they would pay to the British government.
Consequently, the British company introduced intermediaries to collect taxes from Indian farmers. The intermediaries used to squander some of the money they had collected.
They then formed a non-formal financial institution that had the mandate of offering loans to farmers, but then the loans came with very high interest rates such that the farmers were unable to repay the money and in the end, the intermediaries had to confiscate the lands from the farmers.
Alternatively, the farmers who had incurred huge debts had to sell their farm produce to these intermediaries to enable them repay their loans.
In this case, the farmers were being exploited because the debts denied them the opportunity to sell their produce to other potential buyers who would have purchased at competitive prices. This made the farmers to be poorer and the national food reserves declined leading to extreme famine.
The zemindars were princes who had lost their power upon the coming of British rule in India, and hence they had exclusive land ownership rights. Nevertheless, they were used to influence Indian farmers to till more lands to meet the high demands of raw materials in England.
They were used by the British rule as administrative assistants and thus, at times, they forced people to work in farms because they were acting under instructions from British administrators (Burton 2001).
Initially, Indians carried out crop farming for domestic consumption, but the establishment of British colonial rule transformed it into commercial farming and thus, the zemindars were instructed to increase the number of lands that were under cultivation and this in itself led to the introduction of forced labor.
This meant that the Indian farmers could no longer grow crops for sustaining themselves, and hence some had to hire laborers to help them.
When the famine struck India, many people perished because there were no adequate food reserves. These famines would not have affected India if the farmers had not been forced from food crop farming that entailed the growing of crops such as wheat and rice.
Besides that, the colonial rule had made sure that the local textile industries were eliminated from the trade because they were viewed as a threat to their supplies of raw materials.
Similarly, the British company was not lenient to farmers during the periods of droughts and famines and thus, most farmers were unable to pay their debts; this was used as an excuse to auction their land. This was a well-engineered and hatched plot because the lands were sold to white farmers because that was the surest way of safeguarding the interests of the British colonial rule.
Later on, the British colonial rule recognized the moneylenders, and hence the lenders were used to seize more lands. The farmers would have managed to repay their loans if they were more knowledgeable on how to increase the productivity of their farms by adding fertilizers.
Besides, those who got high returns from the sale of farm produce were stupid because instead of reinvesting the returns they spent them on other irrelevant needs (Wolpert 2003).
However, there were a few Indians who were allowed to purchase such auctioned lands and it was simply because they served in the British colonial government, hence this was used as an incentive to reward them for their services.
In some instances, the officials induced the sale of lands they were interested in because they knew they would purchase them at throwaway prices.
The commercialization of agriculture led to the establishment of agricultural laborers. The British colonial rule obtained adequate labor to work in their farms by inducing the closure of local textile industries.
This was achieved by levying high taxes on their imports to India. When the expenses became unbearable, the factories were closed down and their employees had to hunt for jobs in the white owned farms.
The wages were very little and at times, some workers were not paid. Those who refused in the farms were whipped in public and since they did not have an alternative, they just had to work in those farms.
When India gained her independence, these workers formed pioneer workers unions that were meant to fight for their rights. As time moved by, the cost of living increased due to increase in population, but this was very beneficial to the people who possessed land because they were now collecting more revenue from their leases.
Burton (2001) reckons that the number of agricultural laborers continued to rise as population increased and the land became scarce. This meant that their earnings would continue to reduce, as there were more laborers and fewer farms, hence supply of labor outweighed the demand of labor.
The laborers would have to work more to earn more but again most of them had a negative attitude towards work, which continued to be passed on to their descendants.
The famine that struck India proved that farmers could not solely rely on rainfall to water their crops and thus, irrigation was introduced on a larger scale.
This led to the increase in land that was under cultivation because even deserts were incorporated with irrigation. However, people were reluctant to embrace the latest technology in farming because even the leaders did not have a clue of what it entailed.
Reference List
Burton, Stein. 2001. A history of India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wolpert, Stanley. 2003. A New History of India. New York: Oxford University Press.