42
to the nature of the country beyond its limits. The consequence is that the
jurisdiction of the Officer Commanding the Station ceases within a few hundred
yards of the barracks and he is powerless to control the unhealthy conditions
which may exist in their immediate neighbourhood but beyond the boundary, some
of which are beyond practical remedy and all of which occasion a great
deal of trouble and roundabout correspondence before they are removed or
palliated. This radical error is aggravated in the first three stations named,
inasmuch as the territory around each Cantonment belongs to Native States.
Filthy villages exist outside but in the immediate vicinity of Cantonments,
such as at Neemuch, Mhow, Deesa, Sátára and Belgaum, where disease causes
prevail without the possibility of removal or remedy, so that the air blowing
over them is contaminated.
Again, in many stations there is an area of marshy or sub-marshy land to
windward of the barracks which is the cause of malaria. This is especially
seen at Neemuch, Nasirabad; Poona, Mhow, Karáchi, Bombay and Hyderabad.
In some stations, too, as at Mhow, Karáchi, Poona and Deesa, the Sadar Bázár is
so placed that the air, passing over a foul population group, is blown into the
barracks. Then, again, barracks, as the Infantry Barracks at Nasirabad and the
new CavalryBarracks at Mhow, have been built on sites which had been previously
occupied for a long term of years by Native Regiments.
With regard to the construction. Whilst admitting the great difficulty of
constructing barracks which shall answer perfectly the requirements of the cold,
hot and rainy seasons, yet I must particularly bring to notice that generally
throughout the Presidency there seems to be a great difficulty in making the roofs
water-tight and in preventing rain from beating into the verandahs. Such con-
ditions I saw at Mhow during last September, and as noticed in my report on Nee-
much I was informed by the Executive Engineer there and learnt from enquiries
among the men that not only did the roofs leak and the rain beat into the verandahs,
but the very walls of the dormitories were in some instances saturated with wet.
I heard similar complaints of leaking roofs, &c., at Belgaum, Kolhápur and Sátára.
Another preventible source of dampness was invariably found in the leakage
from the Macnamara filter tubs which are usually kept in the verandahs; but
ground-damp, under and near barracks, is in my opinion one of the most fruitful
sources of disease.
The Royal Commission on the sanitary state of the Army in India many
years ago laid down as the very first sanitary requirement of a healthy barrack
in an intensely malarious country like India that there should be absolute discon-
nection between the earth and the floors, and that all barracks should be built
on raised basements so that there should be an air space of at least 3 or 4 feet
between the ground and the floor This action has ever since been steadily
insisted upon by the Army Sanitary Commission and by the Sanitary Comm-
issioner with the Government of Bombay; but throughout the Bombay Presidency
there does not exist one single barrack in which this most necessary recom-
mendation has been carried into effect. In some of the older barracks as at
Nasirabad, Deesa, Ahmednagar, the wash-houses are under the same roof as the
dormitories. At Ahmednagar the damp was seen to penetrate under the barrack-
room and appeared on the wall of the plinth.
Sufficient attention has not in my opinion been paid to the construction of im-
pervious shallow drains to carry away the rain falling on the roofs. In some as
the old Cavalry barracks at Mhow, downtakes have been provided on one side of
the roof, but on the other the storm water is discharged through spouts on to the
ground. In many of the barracks there are no downtakes and the rain drips from
the eaves. In most stations, with some exceptions perhaps as in Baroda, the sur-
face drainage is so far sufficient that it removes the storm water so that it does not
lie for any length of time on the surface; but it should ever be remembered that
it can do no more than lessen the quantity of rain which sinks into the sub-soil.
In no station is there any system of sub-soil drainage except in the Officer's lines at
Ghorpori, where a patch of black cotton soil has been underdrained. The length
of time that the sub-soil will remain damp is well shown by the diagram furnished