MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 12 of 100

Correct — option (1), statement (a) only. Look closely at what the two statements actually claim, because they sound alike and are not. Statement (a) says the Act would protect the farmers from the money lenders. That is precisely what the Dekkhan Agriculturists' Relief Act, Act XVII of 1879, was built to do, and it did it by changing the procedure of the courts rather than the substance of anyone's debts. Before the Act, a sowkar holding a written bond could go to a civil court and have it enforced as written, and the ryot who had signed it — often without being able to read it — had no defence against the paper. The Act broke that. It allowed the court to go behind the bond, to reopen the entire history of the transaction rather than enforce the instrument on its face, and so to strip out compounded and extortionate interest that had been rolled into the principal. It removed the ultimate weapon of the creditor by providing that an agriculturist could not be imprisoned for debt. It interposed village conciliators between the parties, so that no civil suit or execution against an agriculturist could even be entertained without a certificate from the conciliator that settlement had been attempted. And it opened insolvency relief to the agriculturist. Every one of those is a shield placed between the cultivator and the moneylender, which is statement (a). Statement (b) says that by this Act the farmers would be relieved of the debt burden, and that the Act did not do. It cancelled nothing. A debt validly incurred remained owing; what changed was how it could be proved, how much of the accumulated interest could be enforced, and what the creditor could do to the person of the debtor. Indebtedness in the Deccan was not reduced by the statute and continued to be the central fact of rural life into the twentieth century, which is why the same problem returns in the debt-conciliation legislation of the 1930s. The distinction the question is drilling is therefore between procedural protection and substantive relief, and only the first of the two statements describes what the Act delivered.

• (2)(b) only — This would make the Act a debt-cancellation measure, which it was not. The legislation of 1879 left existing debts standing and altered only the machinery by which they could be enforced — conciliation before suit, the court's power to look behind the written bond, the end of imprisonment for debt, and access to insolvency. A colonial government dependent on land revenue and on the credit that financed cultivation had no intention of writing off the countryside's private debts, and it said as much. Choosing this statement alone also inverts the truth twice over, since it rejects the description that fits the Act and accepts the one that does not, which is the most expensive way to answer a two-statement question.
• (3)(a) and (b) — This choice is the natural landing place for a candidate who reads the two statements as saying the same thing in different words, and the paper is counting on exactly that. Protection from the moneylender and relief from the debt burden are not synonyms: the first describes a change in the legal relationship between creditor and debtor, the second a change in the amount owed. The Act made the first change and not the second. The general discipline for a two-statement item is to paraphrase each statement in your own words before looking at the choices, because two statements that sound alike in the paper's phrasing usually separate cleanly once restated — and here the restatement is procedure against substance.
• (4)No statement is correct — This rejects statement (a), which is a fair description of what the Act was for and what it did. It is the over-correction choice, aimed at a candidate who knows that the Deccan Agriculturists' Relief Act is usually described as a limited or ineffective measure and concludes that nothing favourable can be said of it. Limited is not the same as empty. The Act genuinely interposed the conciliator, genuinely ended imprisonment for debt and genuinely let the courts reopen transactions, and those were real protections even though they did not solve rural indebtedness. Knowing a measure's limits should sharpen a candidate's reading of the statements, not lead to blanket rejection.

The Dekkhan Agriculturists' Relief Act of 1879 was the legislative answer to the Deccan riots of 1875. Those riots began on 12 May 1875 at Supa, a market village in Poona district, when ryots from the surrounding countryside attacked the shops of the sowkars, seized and burnt their bahi khatas and debt bonds, looted grain shops and in places fired the moneylenders' houses; the disturbance spread across more than thirty villages of Poona and Ahmednagar. The government appointed the Deccan Riots Commission, which reported in 1878, and the Act followed in 1879, applying to the four districts of Poona, Satara, Sholapur and Ahmednagar. Behind the violence lay a chain of causes: the ryotwari settlement made the individual cultivator personally liable for a cash revenue demand; the American Civil War had produced a cotton boom that collapsed after 1864; revenue rates were revised upward in the early 1870s; and the Limitation Act of 1859 combined with the new civil courts had turned the sowkar's written bond into an instrument the courts would enforce mechanically. The Act attacked the last link in that chain, which is the one the law could reach.

Mahadev Govind Ranade, who lived from 1842 to 1901 and was raised to the Bombay High Court in 1893, is the figure MPSC uses to connect economic history to the reform movement. He founded the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha in 1870 and the Indian National Social Conference in 1887, and his economic writing, collected as Essays on Indian Economics, argued for state-assisted industrialisation and against applying free-trade doctrine to a colonised agrarian economy. That position is what makes his welcome for the Act intelligible: he did not expect an agrarian society to be rescued by contract enforced as written, and he treated protective legislation as legitimate. The commission likes items of this shape because they test two things at once — what a statute actually did, and what a named Indian leader thought about it — and because the two statements can be made to look interchangeable. Note that this question prints only two statements, labelled (a) and (b); several questions in this paper run to three, five or six, and the number is never assumable.

• The Dekkhan Agriculturists' Relief Act, Act XVII of 1879, applied to the districts of Poona, Satara, Sholapur and Ahmednagar and was the legislative outcome of the Deccan riots of 1875 and the Deccan Riots Commission report of 1878.
• It allowed courts to go behind the written bond and examine the whole history of a transaction, so that compounded and extortionate interest could be stripped out instead of being enforced on the face of the instrument.
• It provided that an agriculturist could not be imprisoned for debt, and it made insolvency relief available to agriculturists.
• It interposed village conciliators, and no civil suit or application for execution against an agriculturist could be entertained without the conciliator's certificate that settlement had been attempted.
• The Act cancelled no debt and did not reduce indebtedness in the Deccan; rural debt remained the central problem of the region and returned as the subject of the debt-conciliation legislation of the 1930s.

• Treating protection from the moneylender and relief from the debt burden as the same claim; the first is procedural and true of the Act, the second is substantive and is not
• Assuming that a statute described as limited or ineffective must have achieved nothing, and rejecting a fair description of it along with an unfair one
• Expecting four statements because most statement questions have four; this one prints only (a) and (b), and reasoning about a statement the paper did not print is reasoning about nothing
• Confusing the Act of 1879 with the Deccan Riots Commission of 1878 or with the riots of 1875 themselves when a question asks for a date

The Deccan riots and the Act of 1879 are a fixed part of the MPSC modern-history syllabus because they are Maharashtra's own agrarian crisis, and they are asked about in every available shape: the year and place of the outbreak, the districts to which the Act applied, the specific relief it gave, and the attitude of Indian leaders to it. The commission also uses the episode to test the difference between a commission of enquiry and the statute that followed it, which is why the pair of dates 1878 and 1879 should be held separately. Where the item is a statement-verification question, as here, the discriminator is almost always a verb: protect, relieve, cancel, restrict, prohibit. Read the verb, restate it, and then decide.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following was a provision of the Dekkhan Agriculturists' Relief Act of 1879 ?

  • (a)All debts owed by agriculturists in the four districts were cancelled
  • (b)Courts were empowered to go behind the bond and examine the history of the transaction
  • (c)The sale of agricultural land to non-agriculturists was prohibited throughout the Bombay Presidency
  • (d)The land revenue demand in the affected districts was permanently fixed

  Answer(b) Courts were empowered to go behind the bond and examine the history of the transaction — the central procedural reform of the Act, alongside the bar on imprisoning an agriculturist for debt, the conciliator's certificate as a precondition to suit and access to insolvency relief. The Act cancelled no debts, which is what makes the first choice the standard trap on this topic.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Deccan riots of 1875, which led to the appointment of a commission of enquiry and to the Relief Act of 1879, broke out first at which place ?

  • (a)Supa in Poona district
  • (b)Sirur in Ahmednagar district
  • (c)Karde in Satara district
  • (d)Barsi in Sholapur district

  Answer(a) Supa in Poona district — the outbreak began there on 12 May 1875, when ryots from the surrounding villages attacked the shops of the sowkars, demanded and burnt their account books and debt bonds and looted grain shops, after which the disturbance spread across more than thirty villages of Poona and Ahmednagar districts.