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enable this amount of leave to be taken on full pay.
The method by which I would propose to
effect this is by allowing vacation leave to be accumulated for a longer period than the three months now permitted. I
would suggest that an officer should be permitted to accumu-
-late his vacation leave for the whole of any consecutive
period of resident service provided that he is not given more than ten months' full pay when he takes leave. Thus an
officer after five years' service might be eligible for 7 months' vacation leave and 10 months' half-pay leave, so that he would have no difficulty in obtaining the maximum of 10 months on full pay. This calculation assumes that he will have taken no vacation leave during the whole of his five years' service. This is not likely but there is a margin of 24 months which is probably more than the amount of vacation leave usually taken during five years' service in the Colony. In order, however, to enable this proposal to work more smoothly I would ask Your Lordship to approve the extension to this Colony of the system of casual leave in force in Ceylon and the Malay Peninsula by which an officer is enabled to be absent from duty for an occasional day or two, up to a maximum of fourteen days in a year, without its being counted against his vacation leave.
4.
Intimately connected with the question of leave is that of passage, since it is of little use to devise methods of enabling officers to take leave if they find themselves unable for pecuniary reasons to take advant- -age of the opportunity. The proposal of the Commission is that free passages should be provided for officers of European domicile and for their families when they go on leave, as well as for Indians born in India. In my opinion this proposal goes beyond the necessities of the case. I am fully in accord with the views of the Commission so far as officers on small or moderate salaries are concerned, but
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