in England. In the form of guaranteed interest of percent, the Colonial state promised to repay the interest in sterling. There was a loss of million pounds to India on this score. Calling this as drain of wealth Dadabhai Naoroji lamented that had the money drained to England remained in the pockets of Indians, India would have economically progressed.
Even Gazni Mahmud’s pillage stopped after eighteen times but the British plunder seemed to be unending, he quipped. R.C. Dutt estimated that during the last decade of the reign of Queen Victoria ( - ), of the total income million pounds, million pounds drained to England. This worked to percent of the total income of the country.
Drain of Wealth Dadabhai Naoroji in his Poverty and Un-British Rule in India explained how the English rulers were different from the earlier invaders. He said, in the case of former foreign invaders, they plundered and went back. They made, no doubt, great wounds, but India, with her industry, revived and healed the wounds. When the invaders became rulers of the country they settled down in it; whatever was the condition of their rule, there was at least no material or moral drain in the county.
But with the English the case was different. There are the great wounds of the first wars in the burden of the public debt and those wounds are kept perpetually open and widening by draining away the lifeblood in a continuous stream. The former rulers were like butchers hacking here and there, but the English with their scientific Dadabhai Naoroji Indentured Labour System: It was a penal contract system, totally differing from the contractual labour system of the present day. According to the Indentured Labour System, the coolie (the term applied to an Indian indentured labourer) had to work in jail-like condition, was punishable by forfeiture of wages or imprisonment for (a) negligence of duty or refusal to attend to work (b) insolence or disobedience of orders or other misconduct (c) quitting service before the expiry of the contract.
By invoking one of these provisions