Contents preface (VII) introduction 1—37

5.11.3. Roster of Turn
The cycle of turns on a watercourse or its branch starts from its head, proceeds downstream, and ends at its tail. Before a farmer receives his share of water, some time is spent in filling up the empty watercourse between the point of taking over and the beginning of his holding. This time is called bharai (i.e., filling time) which is debited to a common pool time of 168 hours and credited to the account of the concerned farmer.
The supply in the watercourse has to be stopped when the tail-end farmer is having his turn. The water filled in the watercourse during the common pool time (bharai) can be discharged only into the field of the tail-end farmer and, hence, normally the total time spent on the filling of the watercourse should be recovered from him in lieu of this. But he does not receive this water at a constant rate. Such a supply, beyond a limit, is not efficient from the point of view of field application. The tail-end farmer is, therefore, compensated for it and is allowed a certain discount on the recovery of the bharai time. This value of bharai is termed jharai (i.e., emptying time). Obviously, correct determination of jharai time is an unresolved problem and its present values are favourable to the tail-end farmer.
After allowing for bharai and jharai, the flow time (FT) for a unit area and for an individual farmer are given as follows (4):

_{FT for unit area =} 168 − (Total bharai − Total jharai)
Total area
FT for farmer = (FT for unit area × area of farmer’s field) + (his bharai – his jharai)
Obviously, bharai is generally zero in the case of the last farmer and jharai is zero for all except the last farmer. It should be noted that the losses in watercourse are not reflected anywhere in the above equations.