Page:Arthur Cotton - The Madras Famine - 1898.djvu/8

 capable of Irrigating that quantity, for they are not all in operation, have cost about £2 an acre on an average, and the value of an average acre in increase of produce is about £3, and that cost includes Navigation. There remains, therefore, no question about expense. The cost of Irrigation and Navigation bears no proportion to the value of produce and carriage. There is certainly, in one single case, a remaining question, viz.:—in that of Orissa, which is, Will the people use the Water? The first answer to this is, that this is a single exception. The second is another question, what must the management be, where the people can’t be persuaded to buy Water at 2½-ru. an acre, that is worth, even in ordinary seasons, £1 10 s. an acre? The fact is that it is nothing in the world but unaccountable mismanagement that prevents the water being used. There was one other case of this, but the Famine has swept away all obstacles there, and now the Water is in high demand, and no wonder, when they are actually selling the produce for 140-ru. an acre, where the water-rate is 6-ru. an acre, so that in a Famine year one crop will pay 24 years’ water-rate. Thus it does not take five minutes’ investigation to prove, indisputably, that the sole cause of the Famine is the refusal to execute the Works that will give us the use of the Water that is at our disposal. This matter has been pressed upon the Authorities in every possible way for forty years. It must be acknowledged that something has been done in this way of late years, and happily quite enough to prove every thing that we require to know in order to enable us to come to a sound conclusion as to whether we should proceed boldly with the undertaking. There are now twelve vast Works, each capable of Irrigating from half a million acres to two millions, either in actual operation or far advanced. But these Works are all in detached patches as they were pressed upon the Government by subordinate Officers, without any general plan. When Railways were undertaken, a complete project for all India was sketched out by the supreme Authorities and not isolated patches. But no arguments were sufficient to persuade the Authorities to set about this great work of rescuing