18 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
liable when sufficiently improved to pay the higher assessment, there is nevertheless, a maximum for the best land beyond which all produce is for the benefit of the landholder, and there are remissions in cases of urgent distress. [1. cf. 1832 C.R. P. No. 20.] Another advantage which the Ryotwar system possesses over the Zemindary is in the creation of a great body of independent proprietors, instead of a few who are proprietors only in name : and there is an advantage for the great mass of the people, but in the case of the Zamindary they accumulate for the benefit of the few, while in the Ryotwar system there is also tendency in a considerable degree to the accumulation of capital. [2. cf. 1831 C. 4577, 4578, 4579.]
Such was and is the system of land revenue in India under the regime of the East India Company. A critical estimation of the system we will reserve for the future.
The next important head of revenue is the Opium revenue. The opium revenue yielded next in amount to the land revenue and was levied in two different ways :
(1) “ By an exclusive system of cultivation and sale carried on by the Government in Bengal.”
(2) “ By a high export duty levied in Bombay on opium grown in the native states of Malwa and shipped from Bombay.”
By Regulation VI of 1799 section 3, poppy cultivation was prohibited in Bengal, and in the North-West Provinces by Regulation XLI of 1803 Section 2.
“Annual engagements are entered into by the Government with the Ryots in certain selected districts, to sow a certain quantity of land with the white poppy, under a system of pecuniary advances, the produce to be delivered in the form of opium to the Government at a fixed rate........The total net receipts from the opium monopoly in Bengal amounted in 1856 to 2,767,136.”
The revenue derived from transit of opium has a pretty little history : prior to 1831 the British used to buy the opium from the native states (to keep a strict monopoly of the article) through the Resident and hammer it out at Bombay or at Calcutta. But to prevent the large smuggling into the Portuguese Settlements the