7
of labour tend to cause hardship and privation. The man with no
wife to cook his food, the mother without means to nourish her children
the stranger without friends, those poor physique and perhaps low
intelligence, all suffer under such circumstances to a far greater extent
than they would under ordinary rural or urban conditions. Prices
of food are usually high and there is nothing to maintain a proper re-
lation between the amount of pay actually received and the cost of an
adequate diet: while the sum that in ordinary conditions would ensure
plenty, is under such conditions often insufficient to prevent hardship
and privation. Native contractors and sardars too in their endeavour
to avoid loss or to increase their gains, and even to retain their coolies
by indebtedness, adopt systems of minimum living allowances and give
advances at usurious rates of interest.
Hardship conduces to sickness and this again to further hardship
while every case that occurs, by becoming a source of infection, tends
to increase its amount and to involve those originally the more healthy
and strong, for under these conditions partial immunity to malaria,
which would enable many to resist a less degree of infection, is broken
down and the partly immune person suffers along with the rest. And
so by a whole series of factors and combinations of vicious cycles
affecting mainly the human host is brought about in the labour camps
a state of exalted malaria and the formation of an epidemic focus.
The mischief does not end there. It will be gathered from what
we have already indicated that along our railway lines throughout
our canal zone, or scattered over an area devoted to an important
industry requiring labour of this kind, there will exist various foci of
malaria in he form of labour camps. In the ordinary course of things
small shops and markets spring up near the larger labour camps, and
villagers come in with supplies of food, also numerous petty traders
and others engaged in carting and carrying operations of all kinds move
constantly backwards and forwards between the new scenes of industry
and the older local trade centres. As a result many small villages
and, if the undertaking is a large one, even towns on the line of ap-
proach form recognised halting places, and become swollen and over-
crowded by the influx of strangers. To these places come sick coolies