[build, rhythmic music]
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.
Here you can see the Indus River itself...
which flows roughly from north to south...
some farmland and a lot of water infrastructure.
Like canals, dams, and embankments.
It's a system that's transformed
one of the most arid regions in the world...
into millions of acres of farmland.
And it also helped create Pakistan's
precarious relationship with water.
In the past 75 years
Pakistan's population has increased five fold
while the water availability per capita is plummeting.
By 2025, the region is predicted
to reach absolute water scarcity.
But Pakistan also suffers
from increasingly severe flooding events...
each one destroying land and claiming hundreds of lives.
"There have been more deaths in Pakistan's flooding..."
-"... millions of gallons of water..." -"... caused by monsoon rains..."
These twin water crises expose
what happens when you take a river system...
and redesign it way past its limits.
[swelling, urgent string music]
The modern water infrastructure
that transformed the Indus River Basin...
started with British colonization in the 1800s.
But we'll get back to that.
Before British rule
this region was largely populated by agro pastoralists.
They'd spent centuries raising livestock and growing crops.
Like sorghum, vegetables, and rice along the river.
And they migrated
depending on the Indus River basin fluctuations.
People lived in an enchanted landscape...
where rivers were alive.
That's Daanish Mustafa
a professor in critical geography at King's College, London.
They were sacred waters, there is a living thing
with which you interacted with all the time.
This region is arid
and the Indus River and its tributaries
are its singular source of surface water
fed by snow and glacial melt
starting in the spring from the mountains in the northeast
and heavy seasonal monsoons in the summer.
As it does today, this means the flow of the river
fluctuates a lot throughout the year.
Roughly 84% of its flow occurs from around April to October.
While the other half of the year the river flow diminishes.
And if the flooding happened, the flooding would
typically water would spread out onto the floodplain.
And because it could spread out all over
the flood peaks would not be that high.
Pre-Colonial empires built their own irrigation system.
Inundation canals
that captured flood water and allowed irrigation
several miles from the river's banks.
Like the river, they flowed seasonally
filling up during peak water flow
but were dry in the winter.
And crucially, they followed the landscape's natural drainage patterns.
So water still found its way back to the Indus system and the sea.
In the 1800s, things began to change.
[rhythmic, percussive music]
After a series of wars
the British took control of the Indus Basin region
and it became part of their Indian empire.
The new British rulers wanted to make this region
as agriculturally productive as possible.
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 built embankments
to keep floodwater from flowing past the river's banks.
And key to this canal systems design were barrages:
Dam like infrastructure
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 is emblematic of this change.
It's now called the Sukkur barrage
and sits on the Indus River in the province of Sindh.
This project alone created canals
that irrigate around 8 million acres of land.
"Irrigation projects turn millions of acres
of once barren land into fertile soil."
It's a very Western mindset.
We must control nature.
That's Ayesha Siddiqi, an assistant professor
of human geography at the University of Cambridge.
It's a 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 wasn't just a project in physical engineering.
It was social engineering too.
At the end of the canal with the least water access...
the British granted land to the agropastoralists.
At the heads of canals with the best water access
they awarded property to people who favored the British crown
often former military men.
They then empowered these local elites
to collect rents and taxes.
So it became sort of a reward system
to cultivate the native elites
and keep them beholden to the empire.
There's nothing unique about engineering rivers for irrigation.
Countries everywhere do that.
But the scale of this region's canals sets it apart.
"When the barrage was fully developed
the crop output on the land it controls
will be 5 times as great as it is now."
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.
The Indus River and its tributaries were diverted
into a vast web of canals.
After Pakistan won independence
the government continued this legacy
adding at least 18 new major barrages
and canal links between 1960 and 1990.
The system today includes over 50 canals over 80 dams, 19 barrages
and 2 major drainage projects for agricultural waste.
Therefore, the canal system is considered
the largest contiguous canal system anywhere in the world.
This degree of manipulation has transformed Pakistan.
Cities appeared in the desert.
The population boomed to over 200 million.
And agriculture is the country's largest economic sector
employing roughly half of the country.
And it uses 90% of its surface and groundwater.
This complete redesign of the country's water
has some major consequences.
I would say catastrophic consequences
which we are seeing 150 years since its inception.
[urgent, driving string music]
In August of 2022
an unusually heavy monsoon season
flooded one third of the country
killing more than 1600 people.
The low lying province of Sindh
and neighboring Balochistan were inundated.
When the water across this part of Pakistan
wanted to drain back into the Indus...
It couldn't find a natural path back to the river.
It was blocked by the system of canals, embankments
and wastewater drains built parallel to the river.
Water lingered for several weeks
causing disease and displacement.
Generally, the regions most vulnerable to this type of flooding
are the low lying ones without the historic wetlands and floodplains
that would have absorbed the water.
The embankments along the river were built to protect regions
from riverine flooding.
But the government and powerful landowners
are known to breach these embankments on purpose.
So that some land can be spared from flooding...
while other land gets inundated.
And the wide network of barrages and canals
capture and disperse the river water out in a way
that diminishes the water that reaches the Indus delta.
That means sea water can intrude
back into the riverbed and groundwater...
destroying water sources and millions of acres
of farmable land.
So in the lower Indus Delta in particular
you have vast land masses which are now no longer fit
for agriculture and people who have been practicing particular
kinds of agriculture are completely destitute.
Inequality is also built into the system
in terms of water access.
The richer you are better positioned
you are in terms of access to water.
That means, just like during British colonial rule
landowners at the head of canals today
still benefit from this privilege of better water access
while the people at the end of the canals
suffer from the most water scarcity.
A similar dynamic plays out among provinces.
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 in the Punjab
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.
And that 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.
And 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.