Impact of British rule

Introduction

The two century old British rule had a major influence on Indian Administration. On the one
hand, India moved from a feudal state to a colony and after independence to a fully democratic
country, on the other some of the old systems and prejudices continued unabated during and after
the British rule.

The major impact of British rule can be seen in the development of institutions especially
democratic institutions at the national level, even though they were developed by the Imperial
rulers for their own benefit. Major areas of Indian Administration which have been heavily
influenced by the decade's British rule can be categorized as follows.

1. Parliamentary form of government

2. Civil Services

3. District Administration

4. Local Self Government

5. Independent Judiciary

6. Federal form of government

India was introduced to the parliamentary form of government that was practiced in Britain at
that point of time. Morley Minto Reforms (1909), Government of India Act (1919) and above all
Government of India Act (1935) acted as guiding principles for our Constitution.

But the major difference was that whatever the legislations passed by the colonial rulers were
related to cosmetic changes in the Indian Administration with the real power concentrated in
their own domains.
After independence, a major changed took place in the system with real transformation of the
society into a democratic one. Now parliament represents the true will of the people and reflects
their ambitions and desires.

The Civil Services was introduced by the Britishers to govern a vast country like India as they
have realized the fact that India cannot be governed properly unless it is backed by a strong and
efficient civil service. They made sure that those who enter into civil service reflected the
concerns of the imperial rulers and not that of ordinary people.

They deliberately kept these officials away from ordinary citizens and made sure that they
always protected the imperial interests. But after independence, steps were taken to make sure
that the term 'civil service' truly reflects its name with the officials expected to be civilized in
their dealings and also have service orientation towards the people.

District administration was one of the major contributions of Britishers to Indian Administration.
Even after independence we continued with the same system with District Collector being the
fulcrum of district administration in India. Till the passage of 73rd and 74th Amendments, he
was the real power centre at the district level. After the passage of the bills, a major change took
place with the district collector expected to play the role of facilitator in administration at the
district level.

Local Self Governments existed in India even before the arrival of British, but were given a
statutory status by the British government. But its functioning was not up to the mark because of
the centralizing tendencies of British administration. But the passage of 73rd and 74th
Amendments brought significant changes in the working of local self governments providing
them with real autonomy and independence.

Rule of Law and judicial independence was introduced for the first time in India by the colonial
rulers but only in certain areas and fields. Actual implementation took place only after India
gained full independence from the colonial masters. Constitution provided much needed
independence to judiciary and ensured stricter implementation of Rule of Law.
Another aspect of British rule which had a major impact on Indian Administration was the
federal form of government. Before the arrival of British, during the reign of Mughals, India was
a unitary state with centralization of power in the hands of few individuals.

But the Britishers had introduced federalism, centre-state relations for the first time in Indian
Administration. It continued after independence with the Constitution providing sanctity to the
administrative arrangement between the centre and states.

The issue of the effect of the British rule in India is a very significant issue in the world. It is
important because India and its people were used and treated horribly during their time as a
colony of Britain. It is an issue of human rights, which makes it a very sensitive subject for the
people who were ruled over by Britain, and people around the world. Britains imperialistic
policies that treated the Indian people horribly must be addressed today in a society that is
severely against this kind of treatment. The lasting effects of the British rule over India can still
be seen today making this issue significant.

This issue is complex due to the fact that there are two sides or viewpoints to this issue. There is
the viewpoint that the British had an overly positive impact on the Indian people, and there is
viewpoint that the British had an overly negative impact on the Indian people. It is hard to form
an opinion on this issue due to the fact that each side has strong support to its view. For this
same reason the public opinion is divided with some people recognizing more negatives
outweighing the positives while some suggest the opposite. Many people see the negative
impact as being more significant because British rule in India resulted in impoverished, poor
people and food shortages in India. Many people see the positive impact as being more
significant because Britain brought infrastructure and technology to the Indian people. Because
these viewpoints can both be supported, there is a great complexity to this issue.
The position that should be taken on this issue is that British rule in India was a positive impact
on the Indian people to a small extent. Its impact on the Indian people was negative to a much
a greater extent than the positive. It was a negative force for many different reasons. One
reason is that the British rule over the Indian economy resulted in impoverished people and
slowed down the industrialization of India. Another reason is that due to the British forcing the
Indian people to grow certain crops for export, the food supply diminished resulting in food
shortages throughout India. A final reason is that due to the British imposing their own culture
and laws, the Indian culture began to fade and lose its cultural identity.
The first argument supporting the negative impact on the Indian people is that the British rule
over the Indian people resulted in impoverished people and slowed down the industrialization of
India. The British would not allow Indians to manufacture and sell their own cloth, forcing
them to buy British-manufactured products. Because the Indian people could no longer make
and sell their own cloth, they were not able to make money selling cloth. Even though they
were without this income, they were forced into buying clothes from the British. This created
conflict, as they were unable to make money selling cloth but needed money to buy necessary
clothing. This situation created great wealth for the British, but created great poverty for the
Indian people. Also, because the British were making their cloth for them, industrialization was
slowed down in India instead of accelerating.
The second argument supporting the negative impact on the Indian people is that the British rule
over the Indian people resulted in food shortages throughout India. The British forced India to
produce crops such as indigo, jute, cotton and tea in order to increase Britains economic wealth.
However, because the Indian people were cultivating these consumer crops, they were not
producing food for themselves to eat. This resulted in food shortages throughout India and great
wealth for the British. Also, due to the British introduction of public health care, there was a
population explosion throughout India. This increased population coupled with the already
small amount of food India led to even more decreased per capita food amount.
The third and final argument supporting the negative impact on the Indian people is that because
of the British laws and culture imposed on the Indian people, the Indian culture began to fade
and lose its cultural identity. The British imperialistic views over the Indian culture resulted in
the imposing of laws and culture of the British. British officials rarely appreciated the
philosophical, religious and artistic contributions of India. The traditional way of life of the
Indian people of home-based cottage industries, such as spinning cotton, was diminished by
the British to make way for industrialization. This was not needed because India was better off
economically and socially with this traditional way of life.
Clearly these reasons demonstrate a strong argument that British rule over India affected India to
a great negative extent. The British rule resulted in impoverished people, food shortages
throughout India, and the fading of the Indian culture and way of life and these reasons can never
be overlooked. All of these arguments form a solid case by demonstrating without doubt that the
British treated the Indian people with cruel, imperialistic policies that impacted India to a
significantly high negative extent.

Industrial Development In India

In this twentieth century when science and technology have gained unquestionable supremacy,
the level of the' industrial development of a country has become the yardstick to be applied to
judge its actual development. All other progress has become meaningless; if a country is
technologically backward, it is backward irrespective of any other excellence it might have
acquired.

It is a well-known fact that British Government never intended to develop the industries in our
country during pre-independence period. After independence the people of this country
entertained high hopes from the government for the betterment of their life it is the industrial
development which provides basic infrastructure necessary for the development of the economy
as a whole. Industrial Policy, 1948 and the Industries (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957
gave an idea of the attitude of the Government with regard to the development of industries. But,
it was only the adoption of planning in 1951 which created a favorable atmosphere for the
development of industries.

The history of organized industry in India may be traced to 1854 when the real beginning of the
cotton mill industry was made in Bombay. The foundations of jute industry were laid near
Calcutta in 1855, Coal-mining also progressed about this time. There were the only major
industries which had developed substantially before the First World War. During and after World
war I and II, a somewhat more liberal policy was adopted by the authorities, such as, a
discriminating protection policy, which gave impetus to industrial development. Several
industries developed and a number of new industries came up but their production was neither
adequate nor diversified in character.

The development of the economy can be measured with the help of different criteria, such as the
growth rate in industrial output, industry's contribution to national income, and industry's
contribution to employment. A close application of these criteria divides the planned period into
two distinct phases, the first lasting till 1965-66 and the second following there from. The
economy took rapid strides daring the first three Five-year Plans but slowed down later. The
Seventh Plan envisages a growth rate of 8 percent with some segments of industry registering a
higher growth rate, but only time can unfold the future achievement. Since industry's
contribution to national income and its capacity to generate employment have displayed similar
trends, we cannot describe our industrial development as spectacular though there has been a
spurt of new industrial complexes all over the country.

The pattern of our industrial growth was determined by the state of economy in which the British
left us. The British had used India as a source of cheap raw material and a lucrative market for
finished products and they had not made any effort to develop the infrastructure. After getting
independence, India immediately felt the need of capital goods and it was decided to promote the
rapid growth of capital goods industries. Almost till the end of the Third Five-Year-Plan, India
had to import a variety of capital goods including iron and steel, transport equipment and various
kinds of machinery. But the situation has radically changed now. India is now in a position to
export these capital goods even to the technologically advanced countries of Western Europe,
America, Soviet Union etc.

A significant feature of our industrial development has been the phenomenal growth of the public
sector. This sector comprises public utility services like the railways, road transport, post and
telegraph, power and irrigation projects, departmental undertakings of the Central and State
Governments including the defence production establishments, and a number of other industrial
undertakings which are wholly supported by the Central Government. The public sector now
contributes about one-fifth of the share of industrial sector in the national income and the
surpluses earned by it form an important source of non-tax revenue of the Government. It also
offers job opportunities to a large number of people.

If we aim at an accurate assessment of our achievement, we should either compare our industrial
growth with the growth in other countries during the corresponding period or, we should measure
our achievement in terms of our targets. Another yardstick can be to compare our achievement
with our needs. This kind of assessment can be quite revealing. In 1947, Japan was in no better a
position than India. If India had been ruthlessly exploited by the British and fiercely rocked by
communal hatred; violence and bloodshed in the wake of partition, Japan was laid waste by atom
bombs during the Second World War. But today, Japan is technologically one of the most
advanced countries of the world. Our achievement has also fallen short of the targets laid down
in the Five-year Plans. If we compare our performance with our needs and targets it is obvious
that what we have achieved is too inadequate to meet them.

Industrialization in India suffers from a few obvious drawbacks. Though the aim of
industrialization has been to bring amelioration to the miserably poor millions, somehow
economic power and wealth have been concentrating in a few hands and the masses have, by and
large, been left un-benefited. The industrial licensing policy which is only an adjunct to the
industrial policy has given rise to many evils, economic, social and political. This breeds unrest
among the poor, and the labourers employed in big industrial houses often resort to strikes and
lock-outs, giving a serious blow to the productivity of the system. Finally, regional disparities
and imbalances that should have been eliminated by now still persist. There exist m India a few
pockets that have registered rapid economic development while a few areas find themselves
utterly neglected.

Almost every plan has revealed that industrial production fell short of the target by a wide
margin but, then, there are some inherent shortcomings in our planning system. It need not be
emphasized that planning has widened the horizon of industrial sector and opened new vistas of
industrial growth.

Destruction of agriculture:

Karl Marx wrote in Consequences of British Rule in India,

England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of
reconstitution yet appearing. The British inEast India accepted from their predecessors the
department of finance and of war, but they have neglected entirely that of public work s.

There have been in Asia, generally, from immemorial times, but three departments of
Government; that of Finance, or the plunder of the interior; that of War, or the plunder of the
exterior; and, finally, the department of public works. Climate and territorial conditions,
especially the vast tracts of desert, extending from the Sahara, through Arabia, Persia, India, and
Tartary, to the most elevated Asiatic highlands, constituted artificial irrigation by canals and
water-works the basis of Oriental agriculture. Hence an economical function devolved upon all
Asiatic Governments, the function of providing public works. This artificial fertilization of the
soil, dependent on a Central Government, and immediately decaying with the neglect of
irrigation and drainage, explains the otherwise strange fact that we now find whole territories
barren and desert that were once brilliantly cultivated, as Palmyra, Petra, the ruins in Yemen, and
large provinces of Egypt, Persia, and Hindostan; it also explains how a single war of devastation
has been able to depopulate a country for centuries, and to strip it of all its civilization.

Destruction of self-sufficient rural economy:

British steam and science uprooted, over the whole surface of Hindostan, the union between
agriculture and manufacturing industry.

The third form of destruction was the destruction of the self-sufficient village society of India.
Under this simple form of municipal government, the inhabitants of the country have lived from
time immemorial. These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part
dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-
gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade.

Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of

hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture, which gave them self-supporting
power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver inBengal, or
sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small communities, by blowing
up their economical basis

De-industrialization of India under the British:

After destroying its agriculture British had embarked upon the destruction of Indian industry.
Several Indian historians have argued that British rule led to a de-industrialization of India. By
the Act 11 and 12 William III, cap. 10, it was enacted that the wearing of wrought silks and of
printed or dyed calicoes from India, Persia and China should be prohibited, and a penalty of 200
imposed on all persons having or selling the same. Similar laws were enacted under George I, II
and III, in consequence of the repeated lamentations of the afterward so enlightened British
manufacturers. And thus, during the greater part of the 18th century, Indian manufactures were
generally imported into England in order to he sold on the Continent, and to remain excluded
from the English market itself.

Ramesh Chandra Dutt argued (in Economic History of India, London, 1987):

India in the eighteenth century was a great manufacturing as well as a great agricultural
country, and the products of the Indian loom supplied the markets of Asia and Europe. It is,
unfortunately, true that the East India Company and the British Parliament, following the selfish
commercial policy of a hundred years ago, discouraged Indian manufacturers in the early years
of British rule in order to encourage the rising manufactures of England. Their fixed policy,
pursued during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth,
was to make India subservient to the industries of Great Britain, and to make the Indian people
grow raw produce only, in order to supply material for the looms and manufactories of Great
Britain.

According to Karl Marx, However changing the political aspect of Indias past must appear, its
social condition has remained unaltered since its remotest antiquity, until the first decennium of
the 19th century. The handloom and the spinning wheel, producing their regular myriads of
spinners and weavers, were the pivots of the structure of that society.

It was the British intruder who broke up the Indian handloom and destroyed the spinning
wheel. England began with driving the Indian cottons from the European market; it then
introduced twist into Hindostan, and in the end inundated the very mother country of cotton with
cottons.

From 1818 to 1836 the export of twist from Great Britain to India rose in the proportion of 1 to
5,200. In 1824 the export of British muslins to India hardly amounted to 1,000,000 yards, while
in 1837 it surpassed 64,000,000 of yards. But at the same time the population ofDacca decreased
from 150,000 inhabitants to 20,000. This decline of Indian towns celebrated for their fabrics was
by no means the worst consequence.

There is a good deal of truth in the deindustrialization argument. Moghul India did have

a bigger industry than any other country, which became a European colony, and was unique in
being an industrial exporter in pre-colonial times. A large part of the Moghul industry was
destroyed in the course of British rule.

The second blow to Indian industry came from massive imports of cheap textiles from

England after the Napoleonic wars. In the period 1896-1913, imported piece goods supplied
about 60 per cent of Indian cloth consumption, 45 and the proportion was probably higher for
most of the nineteenth century. Home spinning, which was a spare-time activity of village
women, was greatly reduced.

It took India 130 years to manufacture textiles and to eliminate British textile imports. India
could probably have copied Lancashire's technology more quickly if she had been allowed to
impose a protective tariff in the way that was done in the USA and France in the first few
decades of the nineteenth century, but the British imposed a policy of free trade. British imports
entered India duty free, and when a small tariff was required for revenue
purposes Lancashire pressure led to the imposition of a corresponding excise duty on Indian
products to prevent them gaining a competitive advantage. This undoubtedly handicapped
industrial development. If India had been politically independent, her tax structure would
probably have been different. In the 1880s, Indian customs revenues were only 2.2 per cent of
the trade turnover, i.e. the lowest ratio in any country. In Brazil, by contrast, import duties at that
period were 21 per cent of trade turnover.

British rule had not promoted industrialization in India either. Japan and China were not
colonized by the British; they remained independent. The Indian steel industry started fifteen
years later than in China, where the first steel mill was built at Hangyang in 1896. The first
Japanese mill was built in 1898. In both China and Japan the first steel mills (and the first textile
mills) were government enterprises, whereas in India the government did its best to promote
imports from Britain.

Until the end of the Napoleonic wars, cotton manufactures had been Indias main

export. They reached their peak in 1798, and in 1813 they still amounted to 2 million, but
thereafter they fell rapidly. Thirty years later, half of Indian imports were cotton textiles
from Manchester. This collapse in Indias main export caused a problem for the Company, which
had to find ways to convert its rupee revenue into resources transferable to the UK. The
Company therefore promoted exports of raw materials on a larger scale, including indigo, and
opium, which were traded against Chinese tea. These dope-peddling efforts provoked the Anglo-
Chinese war of 1842 in which the British drug-pushers won and forced China to accept more and
more opium.

Financial Exploitation of India:

Until 1898 India, like most Asian countries, was on the silver standard. In 1898, India under
British rule, had to adopt a gold exchange standard which tied the Rupee to Pound at a fixed
value of 15 to 1, thus forcing India to export more for smaller amount of British goods. This was
another kind of exploitation of the Indian people making them poorer and poorer.

Another important effect of foreign rule on the long-run growth potential of the

economy was the fact that a large part of its potential savings was siphoned abroad. There can be
no denial that there was a substantial outflow, which lasted for 190 years. If

these funds had been invested in India they could have made a significant contribution to raising
income levels.

The first generation of British rulers was rapacious. Clive took quarter of a million

Pounds for himself as well as a jagir worth 27,000 a year, the Viceroy received 25,000 a year,
and governors 10,000. The starting salary in the engineering service was 420 a year or about
sixty-times the average income of the Indian labor force. From 1757 to 1919, India also had to
meet administrative expenses in London, first of the East India Company, and then of the India
Office, as well as other minor but irritatingly extraneous charges. The cost of British staff was
raised by long home leave in the UK, early retirement and lavish amenities in the form of
subsidized housing, utilities, rest houses, etc. Under the rule of the East India Company, official
transfers to the UK rose gradually until they reached about 3.5 million in 1856, the year before
the mutiny.

In addition, there were private remittances.

D. Naoroji, (in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, London, 1901) suggests that the annual
remittances including business profits from mainly India and to a limited extent from China were
already 6 million in 1838. R.P. Dutt argues that 'the spoliation of India was the hidden source of
accumulation which played an all important role in helping to make possible the Industrial
Revolution in England' (in Economic History of India, London, 1897)

In the twenty years 1835-54, Indias average annual balance on trade and bullion was favorable
by about 4.5 million a year. During the period of direct British rule from 1858 to 1947, official
transfers of funds to the UK by the colonial government were called the Home Charges. They
mainly represented debt service, pensions, India Office expenses in the UK, purchases of
military items and railway equipment. Government procurement of civilian goods, armaments
and shipping was carried out almost exclusively in the UK. By the 1930s these home charges
were in the range of 40 to 50 million a year. Some of these flows would have occurred in a
non-colonial economy, e.g. debt service on loans used to finance railway development, but a
large part of the debt was incurred as a result of colonial wars. Some government expenditure
was on imports, which an independent government would have bought from local manufacturers.
Of these official payments, we can legitimately consider service charges on non-productive debt,
pensions and furlough payments as a balance of payment drain due to colonialism.

There were also substantial private remittances by British officials in India either as

savings or to meet educational and other family charges in the UK. In the inter-war period, these
amounted to about 10 million a year, and Naoroji estimated that they were running at the same
level in 1887. These items were clearly the result of colonial rule.
In addition, there were dividend and interest remittances by shipping and banking interests,
plantations, and other British investors. The total drain due to government pensions and leave
payments, interest on non-railway official debt, private remittances for education and savings,
and a third commercial profits amounted to about 1.5 per cent of national income of undivided
India from 1921 to 1938 and was probably a little larger before that. Net investment was about 5
per cent of national income at the end of British rule, so about a quarter of Indian savings were
transferred out of the economy, and foreign exchange was lost which could have paid for imports
of capital goods.

As a consequence of this foreign drain the Indian balance of trade and bullion was always
positive. In spite of its constant favorable balance of trade, India acquired substantial debts.
By1939 foreign assets in India amounted to $2.8 billion, of which about $1.5 billion was
government-bonded debt and the rest represented direct investment (mainly tea, other plantations
and the jute industry).

India did not reduce its foreign debt during the First World War as many other

developing countries did. Instead, there were two voluntary war gifts to the UK amounting to
150 million ($730 million). India also contributed one-and-a-quarter million troops, which were
financed from the Indian budget. The 'drain' of funds to England continued in the interwar years
because of home charges and profit remittances.

There was also a small outflow of British capital. In the depression of 1929-33, many developing
countries defaulted on foreign debt or froze dividend transfers, but this was not possible for
India. The currency was kept at par with sterling and devalued in 1931, but the decisions were
based on British rather than Indian needs. Furthermore, the salaries of civil servants remained at
high level, and the burden of official transfers increased in a period of falling prices.

During the Second World War, India's international financial position was transformed.

Indian war finance was much more inflationary than in the UK and prices rose threefold, so these
local costs of troop support were extremely high in terms of Pound, as the exchange rate
remained unchanged.
For the last fifty years of British rule there is no increase in per capita income. The most
noticeable change in the economy was the rise in population from about 170 million to 420
million from 1757 to 1947. Very little incentive was provided for investment and almost nothing
was done to promote technical change in agriculture. At the bottom of society the position of
sharecropping tenant and landless laborers remained wretched.

Meanwhile Indian taxes funded Britain's Indian army, which was used to expand the empire into
Africa and Asia and which made a major contribution to defending the same empire in two world
wars--all at no cost to the 'home' country! Lord Salisbury said India 'was an English barrack in
the Oriental seas from which we may draw any number of troops without paying for them'.

Man-Made Famines in British India:

The British brought an unsympathetic and ruthless economic agenda to India" and that "the
creation of famine" was brought about by British "sequestration and export of food for enhanced
commercial gain." Three important factors caused devastating famines in India under British
rule. First, Indias indigenous textile industries were destroyed by Londons high tariffs and the
import of cheap British manufactured products, impoverishing millions of town dwellers, who
were forced into the countryside to compete for dwindling land. Second, Indias traditional
granary reserve system, designed to offset the impact of bad harvests, was dismantled. Third,
Indias peasants were pressured into growing crops for export, making them dependent on
fluctuating world market prices for their means of subsistence. As a result, tens of millions of
people died of starvation. These famines were not caused by shortages of food. They took place
at the very same time that annual grain exports from India were increasing.

One third of the population of the then province of Bengal, which includes todays Bangladesh,
West Bengal, Orissa, Bihar and South Assam, were wiped out in the famine of 1770,
immediately after Bengal was occupied by the British Easy India Company, due to their inhuman
tax system. According to author Mike Davis, during the famine of 1876, "the newly constructed
railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to
ship grain inventories from outlying drought stricken districts to central depots for hoarding...In
Madras city, overwhelmed by 100,000 drought refugees, famished peasants dropped dead in
front of the troops guarding pyramids of imported rice."

The British refused to provide adequate relief for famine victims on the grounds that this would
encourage indolence. Sir Richard Temple, who was selected to organize famine relief efforts in
1877, set the food allotment for starving Indians at 16 ounces of rice per day--less than the diet
for inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp for the Jews in Hitlers Germany. British
disinclination to respond with urgency and vigor to food deficits resulted in a succession of about
two dozen appalling famines during the British occupation of India. These swept away tens of
millions of people. The frequency of famine showed a disconcerting increase in the nineteenth
century, under the British rule

(in Famines in India, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1963).

Very few would be aware of the horrendous calamities inflicted on Indians by the British. The
annual death rate in 1877 in British labor camps during the Deccan famine was about 94%.
Extraordinarily low population growth between 1870 and 1930 (due to famine, malnourishment-
exacerbated disease and cholera, plague and influenza epidemics) was due to this exploitative
policy. In 1943 Bengal Famine in British-ruled India about 5 million people were perished, but it
was never mentioned in the British history books, because it was caused by a deliberate British
scorched earth policy to deprive the Azad Hind Army and the Japanese to receive any support
from the local people.

An extraordinary feature of the appalling record of British imperialism with respect to genocide
and mass, worldwide killing of huge numbers of people (by war disease and famine) is its
absence from public perception. There is no mention of famine in India or Bengal in the British
textbooks of history. New historians in India are now putting the blame on the victims. Meghnad
Desai in his article in Cambridge History of India puts the blame on the Indian speculators;
Amartya Sen suggested (in Ingredients of Famine Analysis, Quarterly Journal of Economics,
Vol XCVI, 1981) that people in that area had eaten too much to create the famine.
Conclusion

Under the British rule, Indian administration passed through a phase of rigorous experimentation
and continued innovations. Some of the features of the Mughal administration were adopted and
adapted by the British rulers in India.

The contemporary Indian administrative system has been built on its British heritage. All India
services, civil services recruitment, administrative training, the secretariat system, office
procedures, management of districts, revenue administration, police system, budgeting,
accounting, auditing and a number of other structural and functional areas of Indian
administration have their roots in the British rule.

The progress made in India under British Rule like the coming of railways, Postal System,
Telegraphic communications, etc., were all undertaken by the British Administration to facilitate
their rule. The aim of British policy was to integrate the Indian economy with that of the British
in way such that India supplied Great Britain with cheap raw material for being manufactured
into valued-added (costly) finished products. It is not true that if India remained independent it
could not have developed railways or telegraphic system; Japan or Thailand was never colonized
but they have today much better infrastructure than that in India.

To conclude, it must be said that British rule had a major influence on the structure and func-
tioning of Indian Administration but key changes took place only after independence to make
them effective for the citizens of the country. British rule always treated people as subjected to be
governed but not as citizens to be empowered.

That is the reason why British rule was always characterized by suspicion towards ordinary
citizens, high levels of secrecy, complete aloofness and alienation from people and above all the
ivory-tower approach of officials.

The above traits were inherited completely by Indian administrators after independence and after
six decades of independence we are still struggling to change the entrenched attitude, snobbish
behaviour and dictatorial outlook of our administrators.