Salt - the tax and need
Can you imagine about 20% of your annual earnings going for salt? It indeed was the situation in India!
Gandhi's salt march drew attention to the Salt Tax in the twentieth century, but the Salt Tax was much greater in the earlier period of British rule - especially in the Bengal Presidency.
Salt in Bengal had been taxed prior to British rule. Under the Mughals, the retail price of salt varied according to the degree of local monopoly and difficulty of supply, but was generally cheaper, relative to wages, than it became under the British. The Mughals had levied a tax on salt as it passed up the River Ganges to the interior. This had been at the rate of 2 ½ per cent on Muslim, and 5 per cent on Hindu traders. In addition, local rulers had sometime imposed small tolls. In the early years of East India Company rule, a small "tax" had been levied by imposing transit duties and a high ground rent on some salt works.
Swingeing taxation of salt developed from the establishment of the Exclusive Company by Clive in 1765. This private company, owned by the East India Company's senior servants, was given a total monopoly on salt. All production by others was declared illegal. This enabled the Exclusive Company to double the wholesale price of salt to Rs 2.47 a maund. In 1768 the Exclusive Company was forced to relinquish its monopoly on salt, and free manufacture resumed. The wholesale price fell to Rs 1.48, which included a Rs 0.3 tax to the East India Company.
In 1780, Hastings brought salt manufacture under government control again, under a complicated system of farming. The wholesale price was fixed at Rs 2, of which Rs 1.1 to Rs 1.5 went to the government as a "tax." The farmers used their sub-monopoly to raise the price of salt excessively. In 1788, a system of direct government auctions was started. The retail price of salt at the beginning of 1878 in Patna, Allahabad, and Lucknow was recorded as Rs 5 a maund. In 1836, John Crawfurd described "a wholesale price of five rupees per maund upon the spot, and without reference to distribution over an immense tract of country, often without roads or bridges, for the most part with indifferent ones, and notoriously deficient in capital"
As a measure to control the supply of cheap illicit salt into the Presidency, a customs line was established, which stretched across the whole of India, which in 1869 extended from the Indus to the Mahanadi in Madras, a distance of 2,300 miles; and it was guarded by nearly 12,000 men and petty officers...it consisted principally of an immense impenetrable hedge of thorny trees and bushes, supplemented by stone wall and ditches, across which no human being or beast of burden or vehicle could pass without being subject to detention or search. [more on this hedge later]
The Need for Salt
The chemical requirements of the human body demand that the salt concentration in the blood be kept constant. If the body does not get enough salt, a hormonal mechanism compensates by reducing the excretion of salt in the urine and sweat. But it cannot reduce this output to zero. On a completely salt-free diet the body steadily loses small amounts of salt via the kidneys and sweat glands. It then attempts to adjust this by accelerating its secretion of water, so that the blood's salt concentration can be maintained at the vital level. The result is a gradual desiccation of the body and finally death.
Actual Salt Consumption
How much salt was actually consumed? As mentioned above, the price of salt was often about Rs 5 a maund [and sometimes much higher]. The minimum family requirement of half a maund would have cost Rs 2 ½ . In 1788 this would have represented about two months' income for an agricultural labourer, and by 1878 a month's or more. With such high level of tax, the temptation would have been to economise on consumption.
AbhayCharan Das wrote in The Indian Ryot, printed in 1881,:
Then again there is a still more wretched creature, who bears the name of labourer, whose income may be fixed at thirty-five rupees per annum. If he, with his wife and three children, consumes twenty-four seers [ 49 lb ] of salt, he must pay a salt duty of two rupees and seven annas, or in other words 7 ½ per cent income tax. Now we leave it to our readers to judge, whether the ryots and the labourers can procure salt in the quantities they require. We can positively state from our own experience, that an ordinary ryot can never procure more than two-thirds of what he requires, and that a labourer not more than half.