31 



Sharp: And is it due to just politics within the Indian government, 

 and this increasing secrecy, or was there some other 

 element? 



Revelle: Well, the basic reason is that the Indians are getting more 

 and more self-reliant, there are more and more skillful 

 people in India. Why should they pay any attention to a 

 bunch of foreigners? Even though the foreigners may have 

 good ideas, [it's the fact that] it's not invented here. 



Sharp: The succession of high leadership in India, from Nehru to 

 Shastron Gandhi and now young Gandhi — . 



Revelle: With a short interval with Desai. 



Sharp: Is that part of the reason, the changes in the directions 

 that the highest leaders have gone in, has that had some 

 repercussions and made relations more difficult? 



Revelle: Mrs. Gandhi didn't like Americans. She was always 



suspicious of them. She was always claiming the CIA was 

 spying on them. I don't really know how much of that has 

 washed off on her son. 



I'm now involved with the National Academy Committee 

 which is supposed to evaluate and sort of supervise 

 something called the Indo-US Science and Technology 

 Initiative. The part that I'm concerned with is the so- 

 called monsoon project. 



I have been pushing this idea of mine ever since we 

 published that paper in Science, and I've gotten many 

 Indians enthusiastic about it but never the right Indians. 

 For example, the last one was M.S. Swamianathan, who is one 

 of the great agricultural scientists of the world. He was a 

 member of the Indian planning commission. We went together 

 to the secretary of irrigation and power, and he just blew 

 us out of the water. Now Swaminathan has gone to the 

 Philippines as head of the International Rice Research 

 Institute. It has happened several times like that. I 

 worked with an Indian named Mehesh Chekeval at the Indian 

 Institute of Technology at Delhi, and he hasn't been able to 

 get anywhere either. 



Basically, the problem is that the Indian water 

 engineers were trained by the D.S. Bureau of Reclamation in 

 1912. The Bureau of Reclamation at that time gave the back 

 of its hand to ground water; they weren't interested in 

 ground water at all. They were interested in dams and 

 lining canals so they won't leak and things like that, all 

 of which, I think is just exactly wrong in India, but they 

 think it's great. 



They're worried about waterlogging and salinity, 

 they should be worried about is getting enough water. 



What 



Sharp: And being able to control it, and distribute it at certain 

 times of the year, and adapting it, and so on to supply it. 



Revelle: Sure. But politics have so much to do with water resources, 



