REPRESENTATION..........MANGS ETC. 325
harvest season which creates strained relations between the Mahars and the villagers, with the result that the villagers refuse to pay the Mahars their Baluta. Coupled with their natural desire to evade the payment of Baluta is this state of enmity between the Mahars and the villagers which is a feature common to all villagers in the Presidency and which is responsible for the failure of Baluta system. The result is that the Mahar works in the hope of getting the Baluta but never gets it. The Mahar has no power to compel payment of Baluta. He is a minority in the village and is entirely dependent upon the village. In this conflict it is he who has to suffer. What makes this injustice so unbearable is the conduct of the Government officers, who take service from the Mahars, but who never help them to recover the Baluta from villagers. There is provision in law whereby the Revenue authorities have power to convert the Baluta into cash payment and recover the same from the villagers along with the land revenue and pay it to the Mahars. But a large majority of the Government officers have consistently refused to use these powers to relieve Mahars from this injustice for the fear of annoying the villagers.
- The Baluta system at one time applied to all the village -servants. It applied to the Patil and the Kulkarni as well as to the Mahars. But Government discontinued the Baluta system so far as the Patil and the Kulkarni were concerned from the year 1844 and substituted in its place the system of cash payment from Government Treasury. The reason given was that the Patil and Kulkarni might—by force of the authority they possessed—recover from the villagers more than their quota of Baluta. If this reason was a good reason for abolishing the system of payment through Baluta to the Patil and the Kulkarni the reason for not applying it to the Mahars is a better reason. If the Patil and Kulkarni were strong enough to recover more the Mahars are too weak to recover any. Government seems to have considered only the interests of the villagers. They have never considered the interests of the Mahars. If they had, they would have abolished so precarious a system of remuneration as Baluta for the Mahars as well or would have made some provision for securing prompt payment of the Baluta to the Mahars. It is wrong for Government to have left the Mahars to be paid by a third party