Page:Asoka - the Buddhist Emperor of India.djvu/97

95 comprised under the general name of mahâmâtras. A host of petty officials, yuktas and upayuktaas, clerks and underlings of sorts, carried out the orders of their superiors. The king and his great ofﬁcers, of course, had their secretariat establishments, worked by secretaries, or lekhakas. All the evidence goes to show that the civil administration was highly organized for purposes of both record and executive action.

Departments were numerous. Megasthenes was impressed by the working of the Irrigation Department, which performed functions similar to those of the corresponding institution in Egypt, regulating the sluices so as to distribute the water fairly among the farmers. The Rudradaman inscription at Girnar gives us a glimpse of the actual working of the Department, which had embanked the lake at Girnar in the time of Chandragupta Maurya, and under Asoka's Persian (Yavana) Râjâ, Tushasphâ, had equipped it with the needful watercourses. This instance shows the care that was taken to promote agricultural improvement and so to develop the land revenue, even in a remote province distant more than a thousand miles from the capital. The farmers did not get the water for nothing. It was supplied on strictly business principles, and paid for by heavy water rates (udukabhâgam) varying from one-fourth to one-third of the produce, according to the mode of irrigation.

The land revenue, or Crown rent, as always in India,