MAKING THE DESERT TO BLOSSOM

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXVI, Issue 3979, 9 July 1913, Page 7

MAKING THE DESERT TO BLOSSOM

WHAT BRITISH ENGINEERS

HAVE DONE FOR INDIA,

The greatest enterprise ever undertaken by British irrigation engineers —the Lower Bari Doab Canal, in the Punjab, has just been completed, and its opening makes a landmark in the 'wonderful and romantic story of Indian irrigation. The Engineering Supplement of the “Times’’ contains an account of the completion of this third and last section of the ‘Triple Canal Project’’ which is now irrigating vast areas in the Punjab.

AFFLUENCE AND 7-\ PER CENT

“The Lower Bnri Doab. Canal is unusual in construction, for it actually crosses, upon a level, the important river Ravi. The new canal has cost about one and a-half millions sterling, and it is expected that it will irrigateoverß7l,ooo acres of crops. The Chenab Canal, which is another section of the Triple Project, alone irrigates an area equivalent area of Egypt. The great Punjab canals have .done more, for they have literally peopled the desert wastes. The cultivators have been established in districts which were formerly quite useless. ■ Their villages are thriving, their land is growing in value, and for them the desert sands have indeed proved golden. The Triple Project cost close upon £7,000,000, but it yields to the Government a return upon capital outlay at 7i per cent. Yet it means affluence to the peasantry also, and life in the canal colonies is so poular among the stalwart men of Northern India that the development of irigation is seriously affecting recruiting for the Native Army.

“The attraction of irrigation schemes for the uninitiated is that the results are so visible and concrete. To enter an irigated area in Northern India is an unforgettable experience. The stranger passes in a flash from monotonous, barren sand-hills into a land of smiling plenty. On the one hand', the interminable desert; on the other, green waving crops, prosperous villages, and cool, refreshing gleams of water. iSmal wonder that in the presence of such visions men have sometimes been led to from exaggerated ideas of the possibilities of irrigation. It seems so easy and so simple to collect and guide the waters pouring downwards from the Himalayas, and ‘bring the deserts in.’ But it is not so easy, and there is a definite limit, now fairly well ascertained, to the prospects of irrigation in India.

“When all the programmes are completed, over 85 per cent of the surface flow of the i-ainfall of India and of the water from the Himalayan snows will still escape to the sea. Rain does not fall in greatest volume where it is most needed. The 30 inches of annual rainfall in the Cherrapunj Hills of Assam perforce runs to waste, though it would make the arid emptiness of Sind blosom as the rose.

A WONDER OF THE WORLD

“Though the escape for irrigation in India is not immeasurable, enough has already beer? done under Britisn rule to make the Indian irrigation system one of the wonders of the world. We have expended £40.000,000 on irrigation, have brought millions of acres under cultivation, and provided moans of livelihood for millions of the peasantry. 'lncomplete though they are, the irrigation works constructed

hy the British in India are in some respects the most beneficent and the most practical monument of our nil?. They have not exorcised famine, but they have done much towards that end. Railways are destined to furnish the ultimate solution of the problem of famine. Crops never fail simultaneously throughout the whole of India. The difficulty has been to convey food to the stricken districts, and that difficulty the spread of railways is overcoming.”