OBSERVATIONS ON IREJGATION WORKS IN INDIA. 



101 



has to be supplied to the field channels in sufficient quantities, 

 and in due season, the area irrigated has to be measured and 

 iissessed, bills for the sums due have to be made out and 

 delivered to the person who is liable, and finally the money 

 has to be collected. When things have settled into what may 

 be called a state of routine, incessant care, watchfulness, and 

 industry are sufficient to keep tlie system going with a 

 moderate number of complaints, many of which will be found 

 to rest on some real grievance. Such a system takes time 

 and actual experience to evolve. The persons who will have 

 to pay are not always helpful. In the case of one village, I 

 found that the persons who had been returned as liable to pay 

 water rates, were for the most part dead, and the few persons 

 who were still living, were inhabitants of neighbouring villages 

 who w^ere not on good terms with its present inhabitants. In 

 the end a system fairly satisfactory alike to cultivators and to 

 Government is arrived at. 



The work to be done in managing canals is heavy, and 

 unfortunately, in Bengal at least, it involves daily travelling 

 and exposure during the most unhealthy time of the year, 

 July to September, when not only is the heat oppressive but 

 the atmosphere is saturated with vapour. There is another 

 side to the story, and I do not think I know anything more 

 enjoyable than an Irrigation Officer's tours in January and 

 February. The air is then bright and crisp, I have heard it 

 likened to champagne, the temperature in the daytime 

 pleasant, and at night just sufficiently cool to render a fiie, 

 a bonfire, in front of a tent if under canvas, desirable, though 

 perhaps not necessary. The crops then on the ground, mainly 

 wheat and barley, remind one of the old country, and the 

 cultivators are always desirous of having an interview with 

 the canal engineer, who, on his part, is glad to become per- 

 sonally acquainted with as many as possible of the people, for 

 whose benefit his active life is spent, and with whom it is a 

 pleasure to deal in their own villages. There they are usually 

 truthful, and to no one more so than to the officers, on whose 

 zeal so much of their welfare depends. In law courts it is a 

 different story. The same men who, in their own villages 

 would be ashamed to deviate from the truth, consider them- 

 selves in no way disgraced by connnittmg perjury in court 

 in the interest of themselves or their friends. 



The influence of canals is unfortunately not for good in all 

 directions. Eice is a far more certain crop than wheat or 

 barley ; it is not liable to blight, red dust, or numerous other 



