The POPULATION is 308,000,000, of which 236,000,000
are directly under British control and 72,000,000 indirectly so. This
population is made up of people who speak seventy-eight different
languages, of which twenty languages are spoken by not less than
1,000,000 persons each.

INDIA'S GREAT FERTILITY

India owes much of its fertility to the fact that its soil is
constantly being replenished by alluvium brought down from its high
mountains by its immense rivers. The valleys of the Indus (1800 miles
long), the Ganges (1600 miles long), and the Brahmapootra (1500 miles
long) include an area of 1,125,000 square miles, a part of which, the
Indus-Ganges plain, consists of a great stretch of alluvial soil whose
fertility is as rich as that of any portion of the globe. One hundred
and eighty millions of people live in this plain. So finely pulverised
is its soil that for a distance of almost 2000 miles not even a pebble
can be found in it. And so fertile is it that there are some
agricultural districts in the plain where the population exceeds 900
to the square mile. In that part of the plain which the Ganges waters,
60,000,000 of people find support on the soil by agriculture, at a
density of over 700 persons to the square mile, which is 140 persons
more to the square mile than the density of Belgium, the most thickly
populated country in Europe.

INDIA'S IRRIGATION CANALS AND RIVER EMBANKMENTS

But, fertile as is the soil of India, and propitious to agricultural
industry as is its climate generally, its climate is not always
favourable. It suffers periodically from excess of drought. As a
consequence artificial irrigation has to be resorted to, or much of
this fertile country would oftentimes be a desert. In British India
alone 28,000 miles of irrigation canals are under the control of the
government, 14,000 of which have been constructed by the present
(British) government--works of vast dimensions and the highest
engineering skill. Altogether 28,000,000 acres in British India are
dependent for their necessary supply of moisture upon general
irrigation, and 8,000,000 upon irrigation canals. Were it not for
these irrigation canals, 2,000,000 acres in Scinde (northwestern
India) would be a perpetual desert, for Scinde is almost wholly
rainless. On the other hand, in a great part of India the rainfall is
excessive. Some districts indeed are the wettest on the globe. In
Assam, for example (which is also one of the hottest p