Grow More Cotton

Abstract

The conditions after World War (II) brought about a sharp decline in the area and production of cotton in the Indian Union. The partition of the country aggravated the situation. The annual needs of the present mill industry in the country work to a minimum of forty lakh bales of cotton (of 400 lb. each). During the year 1949-'50, the production declined to the low level of 28 lakh bales. Import of foreign cotton at a very high cost of about one hundred crores of rupees and over per annum became inevitable for bridging the gap between the demand and supply in order to avert a crisis in the Indian Mill industry. There was a scramble for the purchase of the limited quantities of cotton pro-duced in the country and this resulted in the unhealthy competition in trade with the result that prices for all varieties of cotton shot up and superior varieties began to be mixed up with inferior ones. The Govern-ment had to step in and fix a price structure for the different varieties of cotton grown in the Indian Union and allot quotas to the various mills in the country in order to assist the Mill industry from closing down and in order to keep the cost of the resulting yarns and cloth at reasonable levels so as not to hit the consumer. The price structure for the various cottons was also designed in such a way as to check wilful adulteration of superior with inferior cottons.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.002367

Pages

28 - 31

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

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