As India is one of the oldest civilizations, it is no wonder that salt was produced in ancient India and that one finds its mention in ancient scriptures. The salt industry flourished as a cottage industry for centuries. The word for salt is Lāvaṇa in Sanskrit. A passage from Arthaṣāstra, a book dealing with the history of the Mauryan period (300 BCE), says that salt manufacture was even at that distant date supervised by a state official named Lavanadhyaksa and the business was carried out under a system of license granted on the payment of fixed fees or part of the output. This tradition, handed down from Hindu kings of old, is even now followed with variations by the Government of India through its Salt Department. The history of many countries shows connections with salt; in India salt was used by Mahatma Gandhi as a tool to win independence, when he completed his famous 400‐km march to the sea at Dandi on 6th April 1930. The development of the Indian salt industry will now be...
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Aggarwal, S. C. The Salt Industry in India. Delhi: Government of India, 1956, 1977.
Annual Reports of the Salt Department, Delhi: Ministry of Industry, Government of India.
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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg New York
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Gomkale, S.D. (2008). Salt in India. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_9789
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