Effects of British Rule purpose. But after the Company government abolished slavery in India ( ), the system of indentured was used. Under this system, labourers were hired on contract for a period of five years (indenture) and they could return to their homeland with passage paid at the end. Many impoverished peasants and weavers went hoping to earn some money.
But in effect it was worse than slave labour. The colonial state allowed agents ( kanganis ) to trick or kidnap indigent landless labourers. indenture labourers “the innocent victims of a new system of slavery” were first taken from Thanjavur in to the new British coffee plantations in Ceylon. All of them deserted.
Therefore, recruitment coupled with criminal laws prohibiting desertion started in the 1830s. People courted this new form of slavery to escape starvation deaths. In , the Governor of Madras received a communication from the Governor of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) asking for coolies to work on the coffee plantations. The Madras Governor forwarded this letter to the collector of Thanjavur, who after enquiry reported back saying that the people were very much attached to the soil and hence unless some incentive was provided it was not easy to make them move out of their native soil.
But the outbreak of two famines ( and ) forced the people, without any prompting from the government, to leave for Ceylon to work as coolies in coffee and tea plantations under indentured labour system. During - , nearly . million people ( , , ) had gone from Madras to Ceylon as indentured labourers. The laissez faire (non-intervention of government in trade) principles to which the colonial state was committed since was applied to famines also.
For years, western- educated Indians had argued that British rule was grossly impoverishing India. The Orissa (Odisha) famine, in which one third of the population died of starvation and disease, served as a patent proof of this thesis. It prompted nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji, to begin his lifelong investigations into Indian poverty. An eye witness (an Englishman) of the terrible famine in the Guntur district of Madras