HAPPY INDIA 57 



those forests, or lessening their usefulness, or 

 injuring their permanence. 



Over the greater part of India it would be 

 difficult to find a cultivated area more than one 

 hundred miles from a forest capable of supplying 

 firewood. To this, however, the exception must be 

 made to some parts of the United Provinces of Agra 

 and Oudh, some parts of the Punjab, and parts of 

 Rajputana, Sind, and Baluchistan. It is, of course, 

 impossible for a poor cultivator to take a waggon a 

 hundred miles to fetch firewood for a year, so it is 

 necessary that the conveyance of this firewood 

 should be either by railway or motor lorry, which 

 might deliver the timber to some place from which 

 it could be conveniently fetched by the cultivators. 

 Of course a motor lorry cannot work except upon 

 a good road, and the construction of that might 

 involve great expense indeed the expense might be 

 greater than that of making a railway. 



But this expense would be amply repaid if there 

 was an increase of the crops of, say, 20 per cent., 

 because these crops, according to the prices of the 

 year 1919, are worth 1,000,000,000 (and much 

 more), and an increase of 20 per cent, would therefore 

 be worth 200,000,000. Now, a light railway might 

 be made at a cost of something like 5,000 a mile, 

 that is about 200 miles for 1,000,000, or 20,000 

 miles for 100,000,000 ; that is to say, the outlay 

 might be repaid twice over in one year, if the result 

 was to increase the crops 20 per cent. But if the 

 increase in crops was only 5 per cent., that would 



