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2 REPORT ON THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE NORTHERN INDIA
3 REVIEW BYSECTION. the kind of salt traders want. With my experience of two of
4 PACHBADRA.
5 the busiest manufacturing seasons this tract has known, and
6 after having examined every pit in the tract,1 believe J am not
7 far out in estimating our present reserve of salt in pits at 10 lakhs
8 of maunds at least, some of which ofcourse may not really be
9 good salt of the kind we have issued to the through-traffic
10 trade during the past two years; but if our present reserve is
11 not all first class salt, it is I believe all marketable salt, and no
12 anxiety need be felt, as with the salt in the heaps on the
13 ground, and the salt in the pits, we can meet any demand which
14 an emergency at Sambhar might create. After the ensuing
15 rains when very many of the pits, emptied and re-set in 1893-
16 94, and eurly in 1894-95, will be fit to work again, we couid if
17 necessary easily supply from 8 to 10 lakhs of maunds of really
18 good salt immediately. Before the rains set in I hope to see
19 every one of the emptied pits fully and properly re-set with
20 Morali securing thereby for the future a supply of first class salt,
21 more than enough to meet any demand on this salt. source how-
22 ever emergent,
23 “The supply and quality of the salt we may confidently
24 expect from the 169 pits which were emptied during the past
25 two years and from the 15 pits from which salt is now being
26 extracted will be ample and good, as the pits have been disin-
27 fected and the brine purified and augmented by the heavy rains
28 of the past two years ; besides the pits have been properly set
29 with Morali. At the beginning of 1897 we may look forward
30 to having 20 lakhs of maunds of really good salt in the pits.
31 The quality of the salt extracted since the last rainy season,
32 and which salt is now stored in the tract, is not on the whole
33 asgood as what was issued previously. This is what might
34 have been expected as between November 1893 and June 1894,
35 the very best pits in the tract were emptied. If however the
36 bulk of the salt in heaps on the ground at the present time is
37 not as good as the bulk of the salt previously extracted from
38 the pits and issued to the public it is clean and good market-
39 able salt which will sell, and while some of it is as good as any
40 previously issued none of it is as inferior as some salt 1 have
41 known and seen selected and purchased by traders.
42 “ Having seen over 180 pits emptied since November 1893,
43 Thave found that not a single one contained only large grained
44 salt, or even a proportion equal to half of such salt. The very
45 best pits, the produce of which was eagerly secured by traders,
46 contained coarse white mature salt with perhaps a 20 per cent.
47 proportion of large crystals, This is the description of salt the
48 through-traffic traders like most, and it is also the kind for
49 which the Banjarahs now show a decided preference. So long
50 as we can supply traders of all kinds, through-traffic, Banja-
51 rah, et cetera with salt of this kind, the demand for Pachbadra salt
52 will not fall off by reason of the quality of the supply. I have
53 doubts whether the once famous ‘Gugla’ and ‘Tallia,’ large
54 heavy solid crystalled salt which lives in tradition (but never
55 extracted largely in reality) as the kind produced in old times
56 in the clay or ‘Morund’ belt, if obtainable, would now sell
57 as well as the coarse white salt I have described. There is
58 reason for my doubts. About 7,000 maunds of large heavy
59 salt, beautiful’ in appearance, were taken ous of a pit in Bara
60 Sambra. Nearly the whole of this salt was purchased by
61 - one of the leading local salt traders who despatched it to Pipa-
62 ria and Hoshungabad in the Central Provinces and to Saugor
63 ( 50)