30 



could be done, and the figures work out very well. 

 however, an expensive thing to do. 



It's, 



Probably a much better thing to do is simply to grow 

 rice over vast areas during the monsoon and let the water 

 sink in from the rice fields. It infiltrates pretty fast 

 from a rice field, like about an inch a day or half an inch 

 a day. So you get a lot of water stored just by growing 

 rice where you have paddies, where the water is about six 

 inches deep. You keep those filled up and water just goes 

 down, particularly if you don't puddle it too much. So 

 that's probably the way it should be done, but the Indians 

 ■ have gotten more and more difficult in accepting any advice 

 from anybody. 



Sharp: Do you mean the Indian government? When you say "accepting 

 advice," you don't mean the scientists? 



Revelle: No, I mean the government. The government is very 



secretive. The government engineers are very secretive. 

 They won't share their data with the university people in 

 India. They regard it as some kind of military secret — 

 what the facts are about hydrology. 



One of the reasons for that is that they have a 

 continuing conflict with Bangladesh because they built 

 something called the Farakka Barrage which diverts water 

 from the Ganges into the Hooghly River. It is supposed to 

 keep the port of Calcutta free of sediment, and Bangladesh 

 used to take a dim view of this because they say they need 

 the water during the dry season to irrigate their land, and 

 they think they're not getting it because of the diversion 

 in Farakka Barrage. 



The result is that, as in all water projects, there's 

 a lot of bad feeling and a lot of secrecy and it's very 

 political and it has very little to do with what would be 

 the best thing to do economically. 



The other problem is that most of the water in the 

 Ganges comes from Nepal, and the Nepalis would like the 

 Indians to help them develop it, in Nepal. The Indians have 

 been very reluctant to do that. In fact, their behavior 

 toward Nepal is much like our behavior toward Mexico. You 

 know, push them around and — . 



Sharp: And see them as inferior. 



Revelle: That's right, yes. They treat both, the Nepalis and the 



Bangladeshis, the downstream and upstream riparians, as a 

 bloody nuisance. 



Sharp: This was in the seventies, '73, '74, when you were working 

 on the Ganges Plain? The relations between American 

 scientists such as yourself and the Indian government were 

 not as good in this period as they had been earlier? 



Revelle: No. They had been getting worse. 



