23
use of in places where there is little Malaria, and where it is not showing
signs of increasing. Tanks also are undesirable. To do without them means
extra provision, in connection with the pipe-water-supply, of well drained ,
dhobi gháts, and of places where buffaloes can be washed by their owners, as it
does not do to prohibit tanks, and not provide for the due performance of their
functions otherwise.
A good deal more can be done to prevent Malaria where the develop-
ment of a regular garden city is in question than where it is merely a case of
giving permission to individual owners of plots to build, It is much easier in
the former case, for example, to act upon a recognition of the fact that a
combination of trees, or bushes with grass tends to make a place far more
malarious than it would be with only the trees, or only the grass. But the
practicability of preventing this combination should always be kept in mind
where new acts, or new by-laws, are being drafted.
Even looking at the matter from the point of view of the safety of
the well-to-do, it pays in the planning of a new urban area, to seo that a
certain standard is kept up for the building of the houses for the poorer classes
in the local bazar, and that the promiscuous running up of huts for casual
labourers and their families is discouraged.*
The question is to what parts of the island are really suited for residential
development may now be considered. It is just because there are such wide
variations in the amount of Malaria in the case of places situated at no great
distance from one another, and otherwise equally well suited for development,
that it is so well worth while to pay attention to the matter. It is not as
though Salsette were, like so many localities in India, simply a malarious tract
of country in which one had to make the best of it, and be thankful to find some
spots here and there that were rather less malarious and one or two that were
distinctly less malarious than the rest. The point about Salsette is that while
parts of it are about as malarious as any place could be, there are such
considerable areas with practically no malaria at all that one can quite well
afford to set up a very high standard indeed. The Central Malaria Committee,
looking to the general experience of India, classifies areas as " Healthy " in
which the average Spleen Rate is not over ten per cent. In spite of the
intense malariousness of parts of the island, Salsette can quite well afford not
to call ten per cent, healthy, when it is a question of finding room to house a
considerable part of the future suburban population of the city of Bombay.
There is space enough without. It is only want of means of communication
with Bombay that has in the past so often compelled those who wished to build
to -content themselves with a plot of ground in a malarious or in only a
relatively non-malarious locality. Roughly speaking, it may be said that no
Indian who has to go in to Bombay daily will live more than a mile from a
railway, Hence it is that healthy tracts have been left undeveloped, while
villas, that their owners only occupy for certain months of the year, aro
clustered in numbers round the stations of the B, B, and 0. I. Railway in parts
of the island which have, within the last generation or two, become so
malarious that the indigenous population has largely disappeared.
The whole question of the development of healthy areas in Salsette is
bound up with the question of the possibility of providing efficient means
of communication with them.
To make it possible for means of
communication, such as main roads along which an electric or petrol
tramway can be run, to be profitably provided it will be necessary in the future
to concentrate attention and funds upon places that really have a futura before
* Thána is one of the two districts of the Presidency that suffer the most from Plague. While
touching on the subject of a possible future garden city in Salsette it may not be out of place to
note how well it would pay its promoters to make it plague-proof. This does not mean extra
expense. It only involves laying out and building the place so that rats will not find it worth
while to live in it. Grain would havo to be stored, and banias' shops be kept in special buildings
not inhabited by human beings, and cattle and human beings would have to iivo apart. The poorer
houses would be built like the inexpensive, but rat-proof houses of Eastern Bengal, where plague,
though often introduced, has failed again and again to take root. For details of the subject the
Journal of Hygiene, Plague Supplement I, pages 189 to 192, may be referred to.