"If the House will allow me, I wish to digress for a moment to deal with a charge that is constantly made, and has recently been repeated, to the effect that there is poverty in India which is largely due to the political and commercial drain on the country year by year, the political, it is asserted, amounting to L30,000,000 and the commercial to L40,000,000. These figures have been placed even higher by those who wish to blacken the Indian Administration in order to bolster up a malicious agitation against this country. I think it is incumbent upon the representative of the Indian Government in this House to deal with the statement. I may at once say that it has no foundation in fact. (Hear, hear.) Its origin is to be found, no doubt, in the fact that India makes annually considerable payments in England in return for services rendered, such as the loan of British capital; but there is no justification for describing these payments as a drain, and their amount is only a fraction of the figures which I have just quoted. Let me deal first with the question of amount. As the method by which India makes her payments in England is that she exports more than she imports, all calculations as to the amount of payments must necessarily be based on the returns of Indian trade, which show by how much the Indian exports exceed her imports. If the trade returns are examined for 1904, 1906, and 1906, after making due allowance for the capital sent to India in connexion with Government transactions, the average excess of exports over imports, or in other words payments by India to England for services rendered, is L23,900,000 per year during the three years that have been mentioned. This payment is made up of, first, L21,200,000, being the average annual amount of the Government remittance during three years, which corresponds to the alleged political drain of L30,000,000; and, secondly, L2,700,000, the average annual amount of private remittances during the same period, which total has been most carefully examined and corresponds to the alleged commercial drain of L40,000,000. Now let us examine for a moment the nature of these two remittances. The Government remittance is mainly for the payment of home charges--namely, those charges in England which are normally met from revenue. These charges, in the three years to which I have referred, averaged L18,250,000, made up in the following manner:--Interest on debt, L9,600,000; payments for stores, ordered and purchased in this country, which cannot be manufactured in India, L2,500,000; pensions and furlough pay to civil and military officers, L5,000,000; and miscellaneous, L1,250,000. It will thus be seen that alter deducting L5,000,000 for pensions and furlough pay, the bulk of the remittance represents interest for railway developments and other matters with which the interests of the peoples of India are intimately bound up. Besides the home charges proper, certain sums were remitted to England