APPENDIX.
HOW TO MAKE IRRIGATION HEALTHY.
The cause of irrigation has received a frightful significance from this Bengal famine, irrigation being literally a matter of life and death. Not whether we will have irrigation or not; but how to make it healthy, and how to pay for it, are our questions. Wherever water for irrigation and navigation exists, famine is effectually met.
The paramount necessity of combining drainage with irrigation was never forced upon the attention in Southern India, as it has of late years been in Bengal and the North-West Provinces.
In the great irrigated districts of the Godavery and Kistna in the northern part of Madras, and of the north-west provinces and Punjab, drainage is now being taken in hand on a great scale, as outbreaks of fever have shown the results of its neglect.
In Tanjore, south of Madras, where there are above 1,000,000 acres of irrigated rice, without a weed to be seen, the drainage is said to be of the rudest
