The inspiration for developing the Indus basin as an engineering project came from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a key agency of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was created to address the crisis of the Great Depression in America. Modeling international development projects on the TVA was a Cold War tactic, deployed by the United States in its desire to win people and places over to U.S.-style modernization, development and democracy.
The project was framed as a technical one, requiring external technical assistance and funding, rather than a political one. But the project implicated politics, too, of course. Resolving the India-Pakistan dispute over sharing the waters of the Indus rivers was seen as instrumental to stemming the spread of Communism.
In 1962, some 500 American families arrived in what was then West Pakistan, or, in the words of Irene Douglass, an American woman who accompanied her husband to the region, the “far end of the world.” They were mostly construction workers and their families who came to Pakistan after a San Francisco-based construction company, Guy F. Atkinson Construction Co., obtained a $510 million ($5 billion today) contract to build Mangla Dam on the river Jhelum.
About 2,500 American and European workers would come to be housed in a fully air-conditioned town built for them once construction began. The International General Electric Co. supplied $1.5 million worth of the electrical equipment for the dam. Six years later, the $623 million ($5.3 billion today) contract for Tarbela dam on river Indus was obtained by the Italians and French, who beat out American, German, British and Swiss competitors for the contract. Present-day South Asian geographies, then, were jointly engineered. Just as economies in the global north and south developed jointly.
Some people in Pakistan at the time, such as planner, economist and creator of the Human Development Index Mahbub ul Haq, opposed the influx of such huge amounts of foreign aid, arguing that it would have a stultifying effect on Pakistan’s own institutional growth. It also increased resentment among residents in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, at the disproportionate attention given to West Pakistan’s water challenges relative to the concern for recurring flooding in East Pakistan.
During a National Assembly meeting in December 1962, a member of the legislature from East Pakistan articulated this resentment: “This cannot be imagined for a free country. The government should realize that unless development projects of East Pakistan are given the same treatment [as those of] West Pakistan, there can be no real progress. How can there be patience on the part of East Pakistan on account of this long and continued apathetic treatment?” In short, this massive engineering intervention to remake Pakistan’s water contributed to escalating tensions within the new nation-state. In 1971, after a bloody struggle for independence, East Pakistan became Bangladesh.
Today, the Indus basin in Pakistan is a thoroughly engineered landscape, home to the world’s largest contiguous infrastructure network, with water controlled, stored and diverted thanks to big and small dams, barrages, canals and link canals. And it is just this relationship with water — narrowly conceived as an engineering problem and not also a political one — that has been thrust into public attention by the ongoing devastation.