Lord Cornwallis sold the peasantry of Bihar into virtual slavery

 The British, who ruled India from Calcutta, proved in many ways even less kind to the state. The permanent settlement of Lord Cornwallis sold the peasantry of Bihar into virtual slavery. It tried to turn the erstwhile tax farmers into English style country squires, but the new `zamindars’ showed very soon that they had not forgotten their old rapacious ways. While they paid a fixed and often quite nominal land rent to the state, they bled the peasants white. In time their descendants appointed overseers and in inspectors backed by an informal police force of goondas to do their dirty work. An entire parasitic class came into existence which, not content with taking away half or more of the produce, forced the peasants to work for no payment in their houses and fields. Those who rebelled against this system were evicted from their lands, and were often killed or forced to flee from their village.

For over five generations this inhuman system has succeeded in snuffing out the spirit of an entire people. During the Bihar earthquake of 1934, when the ground cracked and threw out jets of sand which destroyed thousands of village wells throughout north Bihar, rescue workers and the local district officers found that the inhabitants were content to drink contaminated water  from muddy streams and ditches, but no one had taken the initiative to organize a joint effort to dig out the sand from the wells!