140 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
these are rather incidental matters and not matters on which the House is called upon to record its judgment.
Having made these preliminary observations, the first point that I would like to make is that some Honourable Members have given to me the impression that the Government of India was never serious with regard to this convention of preventing women working underground to which they had given their consent in the year 1939 and had within four years withdrawn from it. Sir, I would like to make a few observations on the point in order to put the matter in the right perspective. The House will recall that the Government of India had accepted the principle of prohibiting women working undergroung long before the Convention came into existence. The matter, so far is my study of it goes, was first bdebated in the year 1923 when the Government of India brought in a Bill for the amendment of the Indian Coal Mines Act. I would like to remind the house that the original purpose of the Bill was very limited one. It was a purpose merely to introduce safety measures in coal mines, but when the measure was taken to the Select Committee, the Select Committee in its judgement thought that the Government of India ought to go forward and take a bold step and claim powers in the Act in order to prohibit the working of women underground. In the Select Committee the Government of India accepted the principle. Not only did the Government of India accept the principle but they framed regulations with the definite and deliberate object of eliminating women labour from working underground. As the House will know, the Government of India had laid down a definite programme of annual decrease in women underground. So much so, that two years before the ratification took place in this house, we had, under the policy of the Government of India, no woman labour working in the mines at all. Sir, that fact was referred to by the Honourable the Mover of the Motion. But I was sorry to find that she did not draw the obvious inference which I think I may legitimately draw that the Government of India, long before the convention came into existence, has been very definitely of the opinion that women should not work in the mines and has taken definite steps to bring that state of situation to a close.
The Government of India has been blamed for lifting the ban now on the supposed ground that there has been no justification. I must