For Whom the Water Flows

AS part of the Janata government's vaunted accent on agricultural development, the state irrigation ministers' conference last November endorsed a programme for creating 17 million hectares of additional irrigation potential in the next five years. This is one-and-a-half times the total irrigation potential created in the first four Five-Year Plans taken together. The Supplementary Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India for 1975-76, presented in December 1977, on the utilisation of the irrigation potential created by 12 major projects should have a sobering effect on all this euphoria about ambitious new irrigation schemes and their impact on agricultural production and productivity.