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In no respect is the absence of responsibility shown more clearly
than in the method of registration of births and deaths. Without
fear of exaggeration we may say that the return of even approximate-
ly accurate figures is nowhere seriously attempted. The whole mat-
ter is usually left entirely to the so-called doctor babu, who does not
recognise the value of accuracy in these matters and whose returns are
rarely supervised. Too often, indeed, these men, to whose incompe-
tency we shall refer later, are convinced that it is against their own
interests to report the occurrence of more deaths than they can
possibly avoid reporting: and in our own experience "doctor babus"
have actually given reasons why they should not do so.
Another prevalent source of error is due to the general custom
of removing from the labour roll the names of any coolies who from
sickness or other cause have not appeared at work for a clear month.
Such coolies may still be resident in the garden lines, many cases of
chronic and long-continued sickness falling under this category, but
they are to a large extent lost to sight and it frequently happens that
deaths occurring amongst them fail to be recorded.
The effect of such loose methods of registration will become ap-
parent in the chapter on vital statistics. It is only necessary to state
here that the absence of responsibility in this respect is so amazing
that we believe that it would be quite possible for a thousand newly
imported cool es, distributed as they are throughout the district, to die
within a year without anyone being the wiser.
We have previously referred to the general view that where there
is no legal binding of the coolie there is no occasion to provide any kind
of protection, the supposition being that even sanitation and other
precautions will adjust themselves in these circumstances.
It will be instructive to see upon what basis this supposed rela-
tion between sanitation and the legal binding of the coolie rests. There
is a general idea that the free coolie is necessarily living the ordinary
life to which he is accustomed. This is not the case, for there are
great differences to which we shall refer in more detail later, between
the life of a cultivator in the villages, such as the coolie is before recruit-