SCOPE OF THE CHAPTER.

CHAPTER IV

AGRICULTURAL IMPROVEMENT

69. Indian soils, local conditions and agricultural practices vary to an extraordinary degree. A brief description of the agricultural economy of the different provinces will be found in the introductions to the provincial volumes of evidence. It has not been possible in this Report to discuss in detail every variation in tillage and cropping as practised throughout India. We have, therefore, confined ourselves to those features of Indian agriculture which are more or less common to India as a whole or which are of substantial importance in particular tracts, and have framed recommendations accordingly. We propose in this chapter to deal with the various factors affecting crop production other than irrigation. Irrigation is of such importance that we discuss it in a separate chapter.

THE PRINCIPAL CROPS OF INDIA.

70. For the benefit of readers who may be unacquainted with Indian conditions, it may be explained that throughout northern India, the Central Provinces and the greater part of the Bombay Presidency, there are two well defined crop seasons, the rainy and the cold, yielding two distinct harvests, the autumn or kharif and the spring or rabi. In the south of the peninsula, the greater part of which gets the benefit of the north-east monsoon from October to January and in which extremes of temperature are absent, the distinction between the seasons. tends to disappear and there are merely early and late sowings of the same crops. As a general statement, both in the north and south, the principal kharif crops are rice, juar, bajra and sesamum, to which should be added cotton for northern, jute for north-eastern, and groundnut and ragi for southern India. The principal rabi crops in northern India are wheat, gram, linseed, rape, mustard and barley; and in southern India, juar, rice, sesamum and gram. The season for cotton in the south of the peninsula varies with the type and the soil but it is throughout a much later crop than in other parts of India. Sugarcane is on the ground for at least ten months of the year. The total area sown with the principal crops in British India in 1925-26, the latest year for which statistics are available is shown below:

The area under fodder crops, i.e., crops used exclusively for fodder in normal times, in 1925-26 was 8,932,000 acres.

Crops irrigated are, in the main, rice, wheat, barley, sugarcane and garden crops. One-fifth of the total area under crops was irrigated in 1925-26.

THE SOILS OF INDIA.

71. Nowhere in India does the traveller pass over the rapid succession of geological formations he may meet in the course of a journey across England. Several of the great geological series are but feebly represented; others are altogether absent. Again, the variations of rainfall from district to district in India are seldom sharply marked away from the northern mountains and the Western and Eastern Ghats. Over wide stretches of the country rocks and soils are subject to much the same amount of annual leaching by water.

The geological structure of the country and the character of the climate over wide areas thus combine to produce an appearance of uniformity in its soils. But this appearance is deceptive. Wherever, as in the presidencies of Madras and Bombay, a careful classification of soils from the agricultural point of view has been carried out, pronounced variations in quality have been detected not only in the uplands but in the plains.

In any particular area, these variations are usually associated with the depth of soil, and lateral changes are not rapid, but when subjected to the action of flowing water, the texture may vary widely even within the confines of the lands of one village. Where, as may often happen in the uplands, changes of composition occur in the gneisses, crystalline schists and traps forming the subsoil, these changes become evident in the chemical composition of the soil.

Reference to local soils will be found in the series of introductions which preface the evidence taken in the provinces. Here it will suffice if a very brief description is given of the predominant types of soil found associated with the main geological series of India. These are the red soils derived from the rocks of the archaean system, the black cotton or regur soils which are usually associated with the middle period traps of the Deccan but are also found in Madras where they overlie, and are derived from, certain types of rocks occurring in the archaean system, the recent alluvium which is specially developed in the plains of northern India but of frequent occurrence elsewhere, and the lateritic soils which form a belt around the peninsula and extend through east Bengal into Assam and Burma.

THE "RED" SOILS OF THE CRYSTALLINE TRACT.

72. The crystalline and gneissic rocks of the archaean system cover the whole of peninsular India outside the areas described in subsequent paragraphs. These formations thus characterise almost the whole of Madras, Mysore and the south-east of Bombay and extend through the east of Hyderabad and the Central Provinces to Orissa, Chota Nagpur and the south of Bengal. Rocks of the same series are exposed throughout the whole of Bundelkhund and in north-western India appear as isolated outcrops extending

north of Baroda in the Aravallis and Rajputana. Gneisses and crystalline rocks also occur along the whole length of the Himalayas and a fairly broad zone of rocks similar to the gneisses of the peninsula is found in Assam and extends through Burma from north to south. Many of these gneisses and schists contain a large proportion of biotite and hornblende and, as they are highly ferruginous, the soils derived from them are deep red, brown and even black in colour. Crystalline limestones and dolomites belonging to the series are found in the Central Provinces and other localities in the peninsula.

The wide variations in the characteristics of the rocks included in the archaean system give rise to corresponding differences in the soils derived from them. These soils also differ greatly in consistency, depth and fertility; in general, they vary by intermediate stages from the poor, thin, gravelly and light coloured soils of the uplands to the rich, deep, darker-coloured, fertile soils of the lower levels. Where the depth of soil is favourable, irrigation, either by wells or canals, can be applied advantageously. As a rule, soils of this class are deficient in nitrogen, phosphoric acid and humus but potash and lime are generally sufficient. 73. The type of soil known as black cotton soil or regur covers practically the whole of the Deccan trap and large areas in the Bellary, Kurnool, Cuddapah, Coimbatore and Tinnevelly districts of Madras. It constitutes the second great division of the soil types of India and is itself divisible into two groups.

THE BLACK COTTON OR REGUR SOILS.

The Deccan trap extends over about 200,000 square miles and covers the greater portion of the Bombay Presidency, the whole of Berar and the western parts of the Central Provinces and Hyderabad. The soils throughout this area vary to an extraordinary extent in character and productivity. There are the thin and poor soils of the slopes and uplands of the lower trap hills which are moderately productive only in years with a well distributed monsoon. In the broken country, between the hills and the plains, occur deeper and dark-coloured soils which are constantly improved by washings from the higher levels. Finally, in undulating or sloping situations below the general level of the foot hills, is to be found the black cotton soil which varies in depth according to position and, where very deep, has often been accumulated by alluvial deposit. The alluvial areas of black cotton soil in the Surat and Broach districts of the Bombay Presidency, though outside the trap area, have been produced by deposit from rivers flowing through it.

The second group of black cotton soils, those of Madras, do not comprise one continuous whole as do those overlying the trap but are divided up into a number of large but clearly defined areas. A mineralogical analysis of the soils of these different areas discloses the fact that they are derived from the rocks with which they are intimately associated and this renders it possible readily to distinguish between them and also clearly to differentiate them from the soils of the trap area. They would appear to have been derived from ferruginous schists and gneisses by weathering under semi-arid conditions. The soils of the Madras division never attain the