Amount Of Money In Circulation Research Articles

T-|HE usual lines of trade and travel in India run east and west between Calcutta and Bombay or northwest from Calcutta. The greatest long-distance traffic flow on the Indian railroads follows the Gangetic plain and crosses an almost imperceptible watershed between Delhi and Lahore into the Indus Valley. Since I928 I have made ten round trips across India from east to west. In April, I944, I had occasion to make my first trip the length of India from north to south, while transferring from New Delhi to Ceylon as a member of the staff of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. I went from Simla, within sight of the snows of the Tibetan frontier, to Travancore State, within 50 miles of Cape Comorin, and thence to Ceylon by the usual train and ferry route from Dhanushkodi to Talaimanar and on to Colombo. A few informal observations and comments on this cross-section reconnaissance may be of interest. First, travel in wartime India is very different from the comfortable travel of peacetime. Americans now in India find it difficult to realize that before I939 Hindustan had some of the finest trains in the world. The Imperial Mail from Calcutta to Bombay, via the East Indian and the Great Indian Peninsula Railways, compared favorably in speed and comfort with American and British trains. The Frontier Mail of the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway from Bombay to Peshawar, via Delhi, was almost as good. Indian trains today are extremely crowded; equipment is in bad repair; much rolling stock has gone off to war in Africa and the Middle East; and most of the air-conditioned equipment has been converted into hospital trains. Likewise, motor traffic has suffered from shortage of gasoline, scarcity of new vehicles, and chronic overcrowding aggravated by restrictions on civilian traffic on the railroads and by the increased amount of money in circulation. Scarcity of gasoline was evident in all parts of western India. In Cochin, for example, not one taxi was available for hire in the port or in the city. Less than half of the busses used gasoline; the others carried producer gas units. The Indian peasant is an inveterate traveler, and greater earnings mean more bangles and nose rings for his wife and bigger loads for the groaning charcoal busses. Coastal and river shipping has fared no better. The Frontier Mail was only five hours late in leaving Delhi. We passed the day crossing the generally flat terrain of upper India. The country

Read full abstract