64 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
appointment of a Board of Health for the welfare of labour in convenient areas with power to make regulations relating to the drinking water, sanitation, drainage, medical facilities and housing. The fourth recommendation was that provisions relating to the regular and prompt payment of wages and deductions to be made for advances made to labour should be applied to plantation labour. The last recommendation was that provision should be made in order that access to public should be provided to gardens.
Now, when the recommendations were made it is important to bear in mind that the Government of India without loss of time examined these recommendations in order to find out which was the proper authority to deal with them, and they came to the conclusion that except the first recommendation which dealt with the repeal of the Emigration Act and substitution of another, all these would legitimately be regarded as fundamentally of local concern. I do not think anybody could contend that the attitude taken by the Government of India in the matter of dividing responsibility with regard to these recommendations was incorrect. I submit that it was, in pursuance of the decision that the Government of India took on the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Labour they immediately addressed a despatch to the Assam Government informing them that liberty was given to the Local Government to deal with other recommendations, and the Government of India without loss of time, as the Honourable Members know, proceeded to pass the Act which is now on the Statute Book and which covers the first recommendation of the Royal Commission on Labour. Sir, unfortunately, for reasons of which I know very little, the Local Government of Assam did not move in the matter: and if I may say so my Honourable friend Mr. Joshi also, although he has been in the House right from the date when the recommendations were made, did not or does not appear to me to have taken up the question at all. But, Sir, if I may claim credit for the Government of India, the Government of India did move in the matter. I would like to inform the House that in 1938 when the Tea Control Act came up for extension in the Legislature, the Government of India did take initiative and approached the planting industry with a proposal for making enquiry into the conditions of labour in plantation. As my Honourable friends, Mr. Griffiths and Sir Frederick James will recall, even a Conference