Effect of Economic Drain

The drain theory incorporated all threads of the nationalist critique that it denuded India of its productive capital. According to nationalist estimates, the economic drain at that time was—

● more than the total land revenue, or

Views

There can be no denial that there was a substantial outflow which lasted for 190 years. If these funds had been invested in India they could have made a significant contribution to raising income levels.

—Angus Maddison

Taxation raised by the King, says the Indian poet, is like the moisture sucked up by the sun, to be returned to the earth as fertilising rain; but the moisture raised from the Indian soil now descends as fertilising rain largely on other lands, not on India.

—R.C. Dutt

Trade cannot thrive without efficient administration, while the latter is not worth attending to in the absence of profits of the former. So, always with the assent and often to the dictates of the Chamber of Commerce, the Government of India is carried on, and this is the ‘White Man’s Burden’.

—Sachidanand Sinha

● half the total government revenue, or

● one third of the total savings (in today’s terms, it amounted to 8 per cent of the national product).

The concept of drain—one country taking away wealth from another country—was easily grasped by a nation of peasants for whom exploitation was a matter of daily experience.