At the suggestion of the Famine Commission appointed by the authorities in London to deal with the recurrent famines in eastern India, the British government would make heavy investments to bring canal water to the dry lands in eastern Punjab and upper Sindh. This would be done by tapping the rivers of the Indus River system. Canals would be built to take the water to the parched land.

The only problem with this approach was finding people who had expertise and were in number to use the irrigated land. For this, the British turned to the farming community in eastern Punjab that used water from the ample groundwater reservoirs. For bringing water, the farmers used rotating buckets that worked on pulleys to bring water to the ground. From the well-heads, water was taken to the fields by small canals.

The community of farmers was not religiously homogeneous. It was made up of Muslims and Sikhs, but not Hindus. But that didn't matter to the British since at that time, the move to free India from British rule had not acquired religious overtones. All that was needed was to give the farmers enough incentives to leave the land they were cultivating, often with the output shared with the owners. The incentive was to own the land they would be brought in to colonise.

For vetting the applicants, the British appointed Settlement Commissioners who maintained extensive records about the people who were settled. These records provided the number of people who were involved. Settlers, however, did not move permanently; they hired local people to farm the land. They saw their main task as selecting the crops to be........

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