The Fingers of Indus

"Half the country is burned by the sun, and the other half drowned by the river, while the whole is waterlogged with debt." This description of the Indus valley, made long ago by a British official, holds true today. But the wet and dry Indus valley has a further melancholy distinction: as much as anything else except Kashmir, it serves to keep India and Pakistan at swords' points.

Himalayan Snows. The problem of the Indus basin is that its six rivers (the Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Sutlej, Beas) have their upper waters in India, yet flow through Pakistan to empty into the Arabian Sea. For 5,000 years--until partition--the river and canal network was developed as a single unit, creating a valley civilization that stretched back three millenniums before Christ. When the British took over in the 18th century, they added hydraulic engineering to the big and small canals leading off from the fingers of the river system. Some of the canals carry as much water as the Thames, and the system is as complex as the streets and avenues of a bis city, with waterways sometimes leaping over each other in aqueducts as a superhighway does a congested area.

More land is irrigated by the Indus waters than by any other river system in the world. Fed by Himalayan snows and torrential monsoon rains, the canals make fertile some 21 million acres in Pakistan and 5,000,000 in India, and could be expanded to cover 22 million acres more. The system irrigates three times the area served by the bountiful Nile, supports a population equal to Italy's 50 million.

In 1947, when India and Pakistan separated amid bloodshed that was exceeded in the 20th century only by the two World Wars, a border line was drawn through the Indus valley, and the water squabble began. Prime Minister Nehru protested that Pakistan demanded practically all the canal flow, while vast areas of India were "simply thirsting and panting for water." Pakistan cried that India's huge irrigation and water-development schemes would turn millions of Pakistani acres into a dust bowl. When India abruptly cut off the waters of one canal system for a month, a Pakistani leader threatened invasion, shouted: "Better a quick, glorious death than a slow, lingering one."

In 1951 David Lilienthal, onetime chief of the U.S. Tennessee Valley Authority, visited the subcontinent and concluded that while the two nations quarreled over how much water each got, fully 80% of the Indus flow swept unused to the sea. The question was "pure dynamite," Lilienthal noted, and he urged that an extended canal system be "designed, built and operated as a unit," jointly financed by India, Pakistan and the World Bank.

Fair Division. World Bank President Eugene Black welcomed the idea, and both New Delhi and Karachi accepted the bank's good offices. But years of hard work failed to temper nationalistic passions. Suggestion after suggestion fell through; scheme after scheme foundered in a sea of mutual antagonism. Doggedly, the World Bank continued its efforts, and last month in Washington won agreement from India and Pakistan to a fair division of the water flow until March 1960.

President Black, accompanied by his top aides, flew to New Delhi with fresh proposals aimed at a final settlement. If both sides could agree, the World Bank would help raise the estimated $600 million needed to put the plan into operation. One stumbling block is that India would have to put up a substantial part of the funds to build link canals and reservoirs in Pakistan to replace water that India diverted for itself. Still, as Black knew, New Delhi and Karachi are tired of a decade of bitterness, and some Indians and Pakistanis, watching Red China's actions in Tibet, have come to recognize a common peril.

Getting a cordial welcome and favorable response from Nehru, Black flew on to Karachi to test President Mohammed Ayub Khan and to exploit the feeling in both lands that this might be the last chance for a peace. Last week, boarding his plane for the U.S., Black said cheerfully: "We have reached agreement on certain principles, which we hope will lead to a final settlement." Reserved though the statement was, it is the best news on the Indus waters that anyone has reported since the bloody days of partition.

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