534 EEPORT— 1891. 



ments — the supply of artificial irrigation to di'y areas by means of wells or 

 canals. There are considerable parts of India, such as the Patna and 

 Bnrdwan Divisions of Bengal, the Benares Division, and the Lower and 

 Middle Dotib in the North- West Provinces, with parts of Rohilkhand 

 and Oadh, and two or three of the most populous districts in the Punjab, 

 where the population is already so dense that it presses closely on the 

 means of subsistence. Elsewhere it is important to distinguish between 

 the wastes already included in village areas, used as common grazing 

 ■grounds for cattle, and great unoccupied blocks of arable land available 

 for new settlers. Village grazing lands are to be found practically 

 everywhere. In British India there are only a few well-defined tracts fit 

 for settlers, though of some of these the ai'eas are enormous. In the 

 southern plains of the Punjab, betvveen the great rivers, there are some 

 eight or nine million acres of fairly fertile soil, ready for cultivation, if 

 only water can be given to them. In the Central Px'ovinces the Famine 

 Commissioners mentioned two tracts, one in the western end of the 

 Nei'budda Valley and the other in the eastern, or Chatisgarh Division, 

 to which the attention of immigrants might be directed. In Assam and 

 Bnrmah there is a vast extent of culturable land. I cannot do better 

 here than quote the report of the Famine Commission, from which these 

 facts are derived : — ' There is,' it says, ' outside the congested tracts, in 

 most villages, scope for a slow and gradual extension of cultivation by 

 the breaking up of uncultivated land, and for the more careful cultivation, 

 of what is now under tillage, and outside the village areas there is an 

 immense extent of land which is more or less fit for cultivation. But 

 much of it is poor land, and where it is not poor either the climate is 

 feverish or else the conditions are so difi'erent from those that prevail in 

 the densely populated places from which emigration might be desired or 

 expected to come that settlers would be alarmed and discouraged. Pro- 

 bably the only tracts to which these objections do not apply are the 

 desert waste plains between the Punjab rivers and along the Indus, in 

 which, if irrigation is ever introduced, cultivation can be carried on under 

 much the same conditions as those which prevail in the greater part of 

 Upper India.' 



Any such attempt as this to convey in the space of less than half an 

 hour some prominent facts connected with any recent development of 

 agriculture in India must almost necessarily start from the admii-able 

 report in which the remarks I have just quoted were made. That report 

 gathered into a focus all the light then available as to Indian agriculture, 

 and it has been diffusing it ever since. I draw special attention to the 

 conclusions of the Famine Commissioners as regards the waste lands 

 between the great Punjab rivers because I am anxious to point out that 

 the Government of India is fully alive to what is probably the greatest 

 agricultural improvement that it is at present within its power to eflTect, 

 and that the Local Government concerned and its officers are energetically 

 co-operating in the endeavour to bring about that improvement in a 

 satisfactory way. In every one of the vast interspaces between the 

 Punjab rivers, including the space between the Swat and Cabul Rivers and 

 the Indus, we now have either important irrigation canals or projects for 

 such canals sanctioned or unsanctioned. It must not be supposed that 

 this is any direct result of the recommendations of the Famine Commis- 

 sion. Two of the pei-manent canals, the Bari Doab and the "Western 

 Jumna, are of old date ; and the Swat River Canal was planned and the 



