BAR
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allowed to silt up, althougli a little expenditure of labour in carrying away the deposit to the fields would be doubly repaid by the excellent manure so afforded, and the increased capacity of the basin for the storage of water. But the tenants will not labor to improve fields from which they can be ejected whenever their spring crop has been reaped.
Among improvements which
are popularly supposed to be made reguOudh, are masonry wells for purposes of irrigation some twenty thousand of such are recorded as being now used for agricultural purposes in Oudh. I have never seen a masonry well built for irrigation purposes in Bara Banki I have only seen one being so used even, and that was for the Deputy Commissioner's garden. I have been told of three or four being so applied near the qasbas, but the application was limited to two or three bighas of garden land or sugarcane in the immediate neighbourhood, and was supplementary to the proper and original purpose of the well, that of providing drinking water for men and cattle. larly in
In many cases the masonry wells would not bear the exhaustion of their water by irrigation, the sides would fall in. The water is required for other purposes ; often it would be dirtied by using the big leather bucket. These masonry weUs might no doubt be used more than they are, but in any case extensive irrigation from them cannot be expected, and it would be most expensive. While I write in a season of utter drought, December 29th, 1873, not one is being used for this purpose in the large town of Fatehpur, although two have been used, each for two or three bighas, previously during the season. Tanks are not any longer made for irrigation purposes, although still occasionally constructed for ornament, or in the formation of villages.
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Reasons why little progress is made. The reason of this is variously all admit the fact some urge that the landholders are idle and
stated
improvident,
many
of
them
which would drain their
are not so
villages in
yet they do not construct tanks irrigate their lands in
wet seasons and
dry.
Others think that there is distrust of Government but if this was generland would not sell for such high prices. An able writer in the Indian Observer thinks that these tanks were made in former times by landlords when division of grain between them and tenants was the mode of land tenure in vogue. This may be, but there are extensive areas in which this division stUl prevails, and they are just as backward in this respect. The writer urges that the landlord would be inclined to make tanks himself if he would share equally in the increased produce due to irrigation. But he may now share equally ^nay, take the lion's share ; yet he makes no tanks.
al,
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The truth seems to be, that these ancient tanks are of two kinds first, those constructed from benevolence or ostentation by the local raja when the empire was parcelled out of among some hundreds of Hindu principalities doubtless many were also made in times offamine from necessity second, those constructed for purposes of land improvement and profit by the village communities, which under Manu's laws only paid one-sixth of their produce to the sovereign and had practically fixity of tenure. Formerly there were only two sharers in the produce of the soil—the raja and the
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