174 HAPPY INDIA 



raise crops in a district where the rainfall is too 

 scanty, therefore it is impossible to stop the canal 

 in order to make the necessary alterations to make 

 it watertight, and to construct a parallel watertight 

 canal would be very expensive. Therefore the more 

 economical and practical scheme is the system of 

 pumping. It is now eleven years since Mr. John 

 Ashford invented this plan. Ten years had passed 

 when Mr. Leggett read his paper in 1921. In that 

 ten years the work done has been fifteen little wells 

 and one small hydro-electric station. If the Govern- 

 ment had cared to give attention to practical matters 

 there would have been by this time not less than 1,500 

 wells, perhaps thousands of these tube wells. The 

 malaria would have been reduced, very possibly 

 it would have been abolished from this district, 

 but the money that would do all this has been spent 

 in threatening the Ameer of Afghanistan with a 

 war. Fortunately the Indian Government had 

 wisdom enough not to carry this threat into effect, 

 but the preparations for this war, from which no 

 possible advantage could accrue to any human 

 being in the world, cost more than all the hydro- 

 electric pumping stations required for the country 

 fed by this irrigation canal. 



Wherever electric power is available it might be 

 made use of for pumping water from wells for irriga- 

 tion purposes. There are large areas of India now 

 a barren desert because the river floods have scooped 

 out the bottom of their channels and so lowered the 

 level of the rivers that the ground is now 50 or 



