304 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
Use Of Water Wealth
The Labour Member continued : “Given the resources, why has Orissa continued to be so poor, so backward and so wretched a province ? The only answer I can give is that Orissa has not found the best method of utilising her water wealth. Much effort has undoubtedly been spent in inquiring into the question of floods. As early as 1872, there was a general enquiry by Mr. Rehnand. I do not know what happened to his report. Nothing seems to have been done thereafter till 1928. From that year down to 1945, there have been a series of committees appointed to tackle this problem.
“The Orissa Flood Enquiry Committee of 1928 was presided over by the well-known Chief Engineer of Bengal, Mr. Adams Williams. In 1937, the enquiry was entrusted in the able hands of Sri M. Visvesvarayya, who submitted two reports—one in 1937 and another in 1939. His work was followed by the Orissa Flood Advisory Committee. The Committee submitted a preliminary report in 1938 and continued its work till 1942, during which period it submitted three interim reports. The latest effort in that direction was made as recently as March 15,1945, when a Flood Conference was convened at Cuttack by the Government of Orissa.
“With all respect to the members of these committees, I am sorry to say they did not bring the right approach to bear on the problem. They were influenced by the idea that water in excessive quantity was an evil, that when water comes in excessive quantity, what needs to be done is to let it run into the sea in an orderly flow. Both these views are now regarded as grave misconceptions, as positively dangerous from the point of view of the good of the people.
Conservation Of Water
“It is wrong to think water in excessive quantity is an evil. Water can never be so excessive as to be an evil. Man suffers more from lack of water than from excess of it. The trouble is that nature is not only niggardly in the amount of water it gives, it is also erratic in its distribution—alternating between drought and storm. But this cannot alter the fact that water is wealth. Water being the wealth of the people and its distribution being uncertain, the correct approach is not to complain against nature but to conserve water.