For thousands of years, the Indus decided when the fields of Sindh would receive water. On 13 January 1932, men gathered at Sukkur to announce that the arrangement had changed. Across the river stood sixty-six great steel gates and nearly a mile of masonry. Lord Willingdon, Viceroy of India, had come to inaugurate the largest irrigation undertaking of its kind in the world. Human ingenuity had found a way to make one of Asia's mightiest rivers serve an agricultural calendar.

Sindh had long lived by the moods of the Indus. Rainfall was scant, summers fierce, and cultivation depended upon water arriving from distant mountains. Farmers cut inundation canals into the riverbanks and waited for the annual flood. Some years the river obliged; others it did not. A low flood meant dry fields; a violent one could destroy the channels built to capture its water. The system was ancient and ingenious, but the river remained master of the harvest.

As early as 1855, an engineer named Fife was proposing ambitious improvements to Sindh's irrigation. By the late 1860s, the vision had taken shape of a great barrage at Sukkur, regulating the river's level so that canals need no longer depend entirely upon the natural flood. The idea was audacious. The Indus carried immense volumes of sediment, and its shifting bed presented formidable obstacles. For decades the proposal travelled through surveys and government files. Fife's vision outlived him. Then came the disastrous low inundation of 1918. The river failed to rise sufficiently, canals ran short of water, and cultivators suffered heavy losses. The vulnerability of the old system could no longer be dismissed as a theoretical problem. Fife had supplied the vision. The failed inundation supplied a terrible reminder of why it mattered.

Eventually Arnold Albert Musto developed a workable scheme, with Sir Charlton Scott Cholmeley Harrison directing its construction.........

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