58
the Mahommedans, two are employed in railway service,
two are working as clerks to the contractors of forests in
the jungles of the Dangs to the east, of Atgam, and one
is serving in the Income-tax Department in Bombay.
Artisans like Mochis (shoe-makers), Kumbhars (potters)
and Khalpas (tanners) migrate to towns like Navsari and
Billimora or Bulsar, mostly for supplementing their
meagre earnings at home, but at times for learning a new
craft (as was found to be the case with some of the Kum-
bhar emigrants who had gone to Surat to learn car-
pentry.) There is yet one more purpose for which per-
sons have emigrated from this village. That is study.
Two Anavil boys are studying English, one at Bulsar
and another at Viramgam in the Ahmedabad District.
Three boys from a Brahmin family are out, of whom one
is prosecuting his studies at the Engineering College at
Karachi, and two are studying Sanskrit in Chaklasi, a
village near Anand in the Kaira District. It is interest-
ing to add that one of the Kaliparaj emigrants had gone
out to study in a Kaliparaj Boarding School at Khergam*
and a girl from the Christian family had been to Borsad
for -prosecuting her studies in Gujarati, when we made
our enquiries.
The number of places to which all these persons emi-
grated comes to about forty. The most prominent of
these are Kalyan and Bulsar. Evidently a major por-
tion of the emigrants go out to supplement their meagre
returns from land.
MAIN CONCLUSIONS
We have thus seen that—
(1) Atg^m is a representative village community of
South Gujarat and contains a heterogeneous population.
(2) Of the total population, the proportion of working
population is relatively small, being 28 per cent.
(3) The village shows a high birth-rate.
(4) It has also a high death-rate, part of which is due
to high infant mortality which shows low vitality.