ABSTRACT
conscientious effort and reward than exists at present, especially because promotion and salary rules cannot be altered for the Irrigation Department as long as canals are run by civil servants, because o f civil service parity issues. But at least canal managers can be given a clearer notion o f what they should be doing by means o f professional training-a training which should include not only engineering and agronomy but also management science, and which should aim to foster the development o f an ethos o f professional service around O & M work. At present, operational skills and professional norms in our state are so weak that the training prescription-often as ineffective a prescription for bureaucratic improvement as it is familiar-does seem pertinent in this particular case.The other measure is technical: to build many more ‘on-line’ reservoirs along the length o f a canal system, to provide storage intermediate between dam and fields. They would be filled according to a pre-determined, well-advertised schedule, and irrigators would themselves have more responsibility for allocating water to the fields (as they now do under ‘tanks’). Thissolution is constrained by ecological and economic factors (for example, the cost o f land acquisition); but arguments in its favour on engineering grounds are clearly reinforced by the argument o f this paper.Clearly though, one o f the main reasons for the illicit payments system lies outside the irrigation sector, and reform o f irrigation will be difficult without also reform of electoral competition. This is not to say that politicians should be prevented from interfering in irrigation-economists and others are too prone to accept at face value the engineers’ own definition o f political interference as a problem; merely to exclude politicians would in many cases expose irrigators to even worse extortion than they face at present. Nevertheless, some check on the cost o f electoral competition would clearly be desirable. Electoral reform proposals in India have generally been based on the argument that India cannot afford such expensive elections, while the widespread ramifications o f the politicians’ drive to raise revenue have been inadequately recognised. Yet just because these ramifications are so wide, it is difficult to talk o f electoral reform in isolation, without also talking o f the need for political rejuvenation by means o f one or more mass parties able to insist upon performance standards from the bureaucracy.55
