Page:Life or Death in India.djvu/59

 Such are the sums India is losing for want of cheap transit.

But if a complete system of canals were cut on all the main lines, every part of India would pour food into any distressed tract in any quantities, and at a nominal cost of carriage.

A return showing the extent of irrigation in Madras Presidency, gives 4,800,000 acres, and the real area is above this. This is at the rate of 250,000 acres per district. About 40,000,000 of acres more, besides the works in progress, would give every district in India 250,000 acres, and cost about £100,000,000, producing an additional value of grain of about £200,000,000 a year, besides the transit; the whole benefit being certainly eight or ten times the whole amount of taxation, £40,000,000. That is, it is in our power in this way to do eight or ten times more for enriching India than the abolition of all the taxes.

The total paid into the treasury in Madras for water is about £3,000,000 a year.

The Sone works are now watering more than 130,000 acres—the first year, the water-rate of which would be, at 3., £40,000—on a present expenditure of about £500,000, including all the fundamental works; and the value of crop is estimated at £450,000.

Such is the real case of irrigation.

Do not many write as if all irrigation had been a loss to the Government, and the one difficulty how to obtain it without overwhelming burthens on the