Career Lecture Series No. 13. Jute Industry 24th March 1939

If that acquairiance could embolden Sir William Duke to hazard an opinion on the industry surely I coming from an important jute-growing district in East Bengal, where from my very boyhood I have watched the various phases of the cultivation of the fibre crop—from ploughing of the land, the sowing of the seed and then the cutting of the crop and steeping it into water for extracting the fibre and [...] It is to be regretted that the main money crop of Bengal has not been harnessed to the service of the educated unemployed and in the long chain of workers between the peasant and the shipper or the management of the mills the educated unemployed find but inadequate scope for work save as clerks or employees in similar categories. 4 Jute brings rupees four crores or more to the coffers of the Govern [...] This prac- tice weakens the strength of the fibre and cannot but affect adversely the interest of the cultivators and all those engaged in the jute trade—the dete- rioration in the quality and strength of the fibre telling on the demand and the price and indirectly helping the substitution of jute by other fibres etc. [...] The permanent settlement itself is being assailed ; and new laws about the occupancy of the land in partial violation of the permanent settlement and about the lights of the money-lenders and bankers have been and are being forged in the furnace of the Legislature. [...] Syarnaprasad Mookerjee who are taking such interest in solving the problem of unemployment among our educated youths, to approach the Government and the jute Mills Asscciation with the proposal to establish one technical institution— the expenses to be borne by the Government and the Jute Mills the proportion of contribution to be settled between them.