**This is a model of a part of the Indus River Basin in Pakistan that we built for this story. Obviously not exactly the scale, but here you can see the Indus River itself, which flows roughly from north to south, along with some farmland and a lot of water infrastructure, such as canals, dams, and embankments. This system has transformed one of the most arid regions in the world into millions of acres of farmland. However, it has also caused Pakistan to have a precarious relationship with water. In the past 75 years, Pakistan’s population has increased fivefold, while the water availability per capita is plummeting. By 2025, the region is predicted to reach absolute water scarcity. Additionally, Pakistan also suffers from increasingly severe flooding events, each one destroying land and claiming hundreds of lives.
Before British colonization in the 1800s, the region was largely populated by agro pastoralists who had spent centuries raising livestock and growing crops, such as sorghum, vegetables, and rice along the river. People lived in an enchanted landscape where rivers were alive, and were considered sacred waters with which they interacted all the time.
The modern water infrastructure that transformed the Indus River Basin started with British colonization. They began building a much larger network of canals designed not just to capture flood season flow, but to irrigate year round and to extend the river waters reach. This water would irrigate cash crops like wheat and cotton up to a hundred miles from a river source. The British also built embankments to keep floodwater from flowing past the river’s banks, and barrages (dam like structures) that raised the river’s upstream water level so that water can be funneled into canals with gates that open and close depending on water supply and demand. The completion of the Lloyd barrage in 1932 (now called the Sukkur barrage) is emblematic of this change, and this project alone created canals that irrigate around 8 million acres of land.** Ayesha Siddiqi, an assistant professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge, discusses the modernist way of looking at the river which was involved in the early 20th century. The British Crown moved farmers onto plots of farmland along the canals and destroyed the wetlands, forests, and biodiversity that was there before. This was not only a physical engineering project, but a social engineering one as well. Those who favored the British Crown, such as former military men, were awarded property at the heads of canals with the best water access, while agropastoralists were granted land at the end of canals with the least water access. This became a reward system to cultivate the native elites and keep them beholden to the empire. The scale of this region’s canals sets it apart, and by 1947, at the end of British rule, the canal system had grown into a large network that turned roughly 26 million acres of land in the basin into farmland. After Pakistan won independence, the government continued this legacy, adding at least 18 new major barrages and canal links between 1960 and 1990. This degree of manipulation has transformed Pakistan, creating cities in the desert, a booming population of over 200 million, and an agricultural sector that is the country’s largest economic sector, employing roughly half of the country and using 90% of its surface and groundwater. However, this complete redesign of the country’s water has had catastrophic consequences, such as the flooding of one third of the country in August of 2022, which killed more than 1600 people. Additionally, inequality is built into the system in terms of water access, with those who are richer and better positioned having better access to water, just as during British colonial rule. Punjab is an upstream province, meaning they get access to the river water before Sindh in the south and can use the control of the barrages to direct how much water flows downstream. Pakistani officials have proposed building more mega dams along their rivers as a solution to water scarcity and flooding, showing they intend to continue the same colonial tradition of over engineering the Indus River. It’s a question of a very colonial mindset that has continued in post-colonial Pakistan, where the way to manage the river basin is only through engineered solutions and not taking account for indigenous knowledge systems.
With a problem this massive, a single overarching solution might be impossible. But slow and sustained changes to water policy like preventing more development in floodplains, clearing out obstructions to drainage pathways and listening to local communities, could help reduce the extremely negative impacts the system has created. Thinking differently basically means to think about what have we done wrong? You need to make amends for those mistakes. A more democratic mode of going forward with water management, with flood management, taking everyone along with you, is the only recipe that I can think of.