Burma: Census of India 1901 Vol. I - Khamkoo

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44 REPORT ON THE CENSUS OF BURMA.
71,676 workers and dependents, and boat and barge men, 88,415 workers and
dependents. I have adverted, in the paragraph dealing with Order X, to the increase
in cart building during the past ten years and to the apparent decline in the boatbuilding
industry. The probability that improved land communications will tend to
the partial supersession of boat by land carriage seems hinted at by the figures for
transport ; for whereas land transport now supports 79,306 workers and dependents
against 59,549 so supported in 189 1, water transport finds occupation for 1 13,941,
or less than a thousand persons only more than ten years ago. The growth of the
two main classes of transport has been by no means equal. The totals for the last
two sub-orders of Order XIX, which contain figures for Post Office, Telegraphs
and Storage and Weighing, have nothing suggestive to show. Nearly 70 per cent,
of the actual workers in the last sub-order (62) were enumerated in the cities of
Burma. With the exception of sub-order 28 (Books and Prints) this is the highest
proportion of urban workers in any of the sub-orders.
227. The professional section of the population of Burma numbered 264,047
workers
Class F
and dependents, a figure which represents 2*54
—Professions
per cent, of the total population whose occupations
were recorded on the schedules. In Class F the actual workers are slightly in excess
of the dependents, a state of things which seems somewhat peculiar when it is borne
in mind that the number of professional females is comparatively small and that
the Indian element does not enter much into the composition of the professional
classes. Space forbids me to dwell at any length on the professions followed by
the people of the country except two, tattooing and midwifery, callings which, at
the suggestion of the Census Commissioner, have been dealt with rather more
fully than the rest.
228. The first of the learned professions, the religious, is strongly represented
Learned professions.
in Bua. The total of 75,365 male actual workers
shown under the head " Religious mendicants, inmates
of monasteries, convents, &c," represents generally the strength of the indigenous
Buddhist priesthood. No attempt was made at the recent Census to discriminate
between Pdvgyis, Upazins and Koyins, and scholars now figure wholly in the
dependents' column instead of having a separate occupation number assigned to
them so that detailed comparison of the items of which sub-order 63 is made up
is of no particular value, but the total of the sub-order gives no indication of any
diminution during the past decade in the strength of the religious orders of the
Province. Education too (sub-order 64) exhibits a higher aggregate than it did
ten years ago. Literature (sub-order 65) shows a rather large total under the
head "writers (unspecified)." This represents the sum of persons entered as
" Clerks " whom it was found impossible to assign to one or other of the many
clerical heads under Administration, Commerce and the like. Law (sub-order 66)
exhibits a very considerable increase on the 1891 figures. The latter aggregated
4,279. The 1 90 1 total was 7,507. Barristers and Advocates have risen in number
since the last enumeration, but the principal growth is in the total of lawyers'
clerks and petition-writers with their dependents. Sub-order 67, dealing with
medicine, similarly shows an increase on the figures of the previous Census. The
total of practitioners without diploma—the class in whose hands the care of the
bodies of the bulk of the people of the Province still unfortunately rests—has risen
from 37,276 actual workers and dependents to 43,252.
229. A total of 1,942 females returned themselves as midwives at the
enumeration. In
. 1891 the total number of persons
dependent on midwifery was 819. The sex and age
figures show that of these the actual number of persons actually following the
calling of a midwife must have been less than 500. There can be little doubt that
a large proportion of the women who made a practice of attending at child-births
must have then been returned under some other head of occupation. This fact in
itself is indicative of the haphazard, amateurish view taken by the people of the
country of the profession upon which such important issues hang. Not only is
it ordinarily combined with some other occupation, but in the majority of cases it
has occupied so subordinate a position as^to have been not thought worth
recording.