THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT IN INDIA 83 



not less than eight feet per year. So that to do any 

 good these irrigation works have to have such large 

 storage capacity that they are sometimes larger than 

 seems necessary. One very interesting by-product of 

 this large storage reservoir system is that there is a seep- 

 age and ground flow with a lateral movement of the 

 water in the soil, so that wells five or six miles away 

 from the storage reservoir that would have gone dry 

 before the storage was put in, now have an abundance 

 of water all through the dry season. These works are 

 well named protective, and fully justify their construc- 

 tion. 



In the case of the productive works there were large 

 areas of good land in the region of deficient rain-fall 

 in Northwest India insluding the Punjab where the slope 

 was right and the rivers, the Jhelum, the Ravi, the 

 Chenab, the Beas, the Sutlej and the Indus, bring down 

 an abundance of snow waters from the Himalaya mount- 

 ains which can easily be spread over the desert of the 

 Punjab and cause it to blossom as the rose. Ten mil- 

 lion acres are now thus irrigated and schemes are pre- 

 pared for the irrigation of twelve million more acres. 

 The Bhakra Dam project on the Sutlej will give 300,000 

 H.P. The height of the dam, 394 ft., will make it the 

 highest in the world. The area that will be irrigated 

 will be four times the irrigated area of Egypt. 



' ' The value of the crops raised by the aid of the canal 

 water during 1918 and 1919 was well over fifty-five 

 crores of rupees (a crore is ten million rupees and the 

 value of a rupee at that time was about forty-five cents), 

 so the value of crops was $247,500,000. Had there 

 been no canals it is safe to say that the area concerned 



