Notes on the North-Western Provinces of India (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. ON IRRIGATION. Irrigation is the soul of agriculture in the North-West Provinces; without it many crops are impossible, and all are precarious. For want of it, famines are certain, and periodical visitations; and the country is, from time to time, reduced to poverty and desolation. The huts of the peasantry, emptied and unroofed by one famine, are hardly repaired and tenanted again, before another has come. The fields, thrown out of cultivation owing to one season of drought, have scarcely been brought again under the plough, before another dearth lays them waste. The subject of irrigation is so closely connected with the welfare of the people, and so interwoven' with questions of the rent and assessment of land, that I may be allowed to give some space to it. Irrigation, then, is of three kinds, namely, from wells, from canals, and from tanks or ponds. To begin with irrigation from wells. It is a kind provision of Nature that the greater part of this region, which so needs a supply of water besides the rain, is bounteously gifted with springs at various depths below the surface. In the countries of Rohilcund and the Teraee, the water is so near the top that it can be easily lifted with the lever and bucket which is familiar to all travellers in Egypt. In the low lands, along the Ganges and other rivers, water is also found close beneath the surface. In the Doab, the distance to water varies very much. It is seldom less than fifteen feet, except in the low grounds near the rivers; and in wells used for agriculture not often more than sixty feet. This, at least, is the result of my experience, and I have measured a large number of wells. The common depth to the water, I have found to be between twenty and thirty feet. The water appears to be nearest to the surfac...