The observation made by William Ben tick, the Governor General of India, on the decline of textile industry that was world famous once. The bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India.
The British policies completely ruined not only the agricultural sector, but also the handicrafts in India.Large scale import of machine made British textiles was the major reason for the ruin of Indian textile industry.The machine made textiles imported from Britain could be sold easily, for they were cheaper.
The expansion of railway was also responsible for the decline of the Indian textile industry.It helped the British to carry the imported fabrics from port towns to interior villages and the cotton collected from villages to the ports for exporting to Britain.
Due to the higher tax levied, the price of Indian textiles exported to Britain increased so it lost the British market too.Weavers gave up their work massively due to the exploitation and torture of the British officers. So they searched for other jobs. The textile centers like Murshidabad and Dhaka that were thickly populated once, became least inhabited.
The people, who had been working in the textile industry migrated to villages and engaged in agriculture related works. This led to the stagnation in agriculture. The ruins of agriculture sector and handicrafts industry led India to famine and deaths due to starvation. Lakhs of people died of famine.
