Quantifying the Drain of Wealth | Dadabhai Naoroji | Milestone | The Making of Modern India
Channel: Peepul Tree World (Live History India)
Date: 04/02/2021

Everyone knew that British rule had had a devastating impact on India's economy. But it was Dadabhai Naoroji who first put a number to it. Here is the first of our milestones in the Making of Modern India (1900-2000) - 

In 1900 the Indian subcontinent opened the new year and millennium – bruised and battered. Nearly 150 years of British rule had resulted in an unprecedented loss of lives and wealth …millions had died in famines stretching across India from Bengal to the North west Frontier Province and the Deccan.

Given how things were, it is only fitting that our first milestone in the 100 years that shaped Modern India from 1900-2000 should start by recognising the work done by the grand old man of India’s national movement. Dadabhai Naoroji whose book Poverty and Un-British rule in India was published in 1901. This was a compilation of the 30 years of detailed research and papers that Naoroji, a mathematician by training had published on how British policies had led to lower productivity, a drain of wealth and devastation across India

While other nationalist leaders had alluded to the fact that British rule had crippled India’s economy, it was Naoroji who managed to expand on it, backed by strong data, statistics and hard numbers which he collated from across the country. The numbers were staggering.

In 1867, Naoroji had calculated that British rule had resulted, till then, in the transfer of a whopping 1.6 billion pounds. from the subcontinent.  What’s more, he claimed that the drain continued unabated . Britain managed  to siphon off at least  £33 million each year from India.

Naoroji was also perhaps the first person to try and calculate the per capita income of each Indian. In 1871 based on his estimates that India’s GDP was 200 million he surmised that the average per capita income of each Indian of the time was just 27 – 40 shillings this was around 25 times lower than the income of an average Britisher!

Naoroji analysis took much effort and was met with great cynicism in Britain. But the data and research Naoroji collected and the conclusions he drew did stand the test of time.

This book remains a seminal work of the period and continues to shape debates and discussions even today. In fact it is telling that Naoroji is today more often remembered  as the man who penned the term ‘Drain of Wealth’….. Fewer remember him as the first man of colour to win an election in Britain and sit in the house of commons way back in 1892!



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