27 



Revelle: 



Sharp : 



trying to get under way. The Ganges River Basin project was 

 one of them and there were many descriptions of the tensions 

 between India and West Pakistan, and India and East 

 Pakistan. [reviewing letter, Revelle laughs.] You laugh. 



That letter made me wonder a bit about what kind 

 of person Staples was. 



A very nice, very smart, and original person. Primarily an 

 applied mathematician. 



Well, yes, he looks like he wants to apply it quite a 

 bit — . 



Revelle: Oh yes. 



Sharp: — as a result of that memo. 



Water Politics and the Indian Government 



Sharp: Maybe we could talk more generally about the efforts of the 

 center to do certain projects and certain programs in the 

 less developed countries and the role of the governments, 

 (the role of the Indian government, the role of the West 

 Pakistani government) , in hindering or assisting what the 

 center decided it wanted to do as a project. 



Some of the letters set out your ideas about what 

 might be done. Almost as a scientist setting out a certain 

 objective, but then the political realities set in and 

 things don't happen. 



Revelle: That's right, quite right. 



The more successful of these India-Pakistan projects, 

 primarily an Indian project, was a big grant we got from the 

 Ford Foundation of India sometime in the early 1970s, after 

 we had done this work in Bangladesh. This was to bring 

 scholarly fellows or essentially faculty members from Indian 

 universities and the members of Indian government 

 departments dealing with water and agriculture and related 

 fields to Cambridge for a year to three years of study, of 

 work, really research, on problems of resource development, 

 particularly land and water development, which was our bag. 



Peter Rogers and Dick Tabors ran that program, and it 

 lasted, basically, until I left. It continued after I left, 

 but Peter never got along with Bill Alonso at all, so he 

 moved the project to the School of Design, and from 1976 to 

 '78, I had my office in the School of Design, not in the 

 center. 



We had a couple of dozen people that Peter recruited 

 in India from universities and from government departments 

 to come and learn about programming, planning and analysis 

 of water resources. It was basically water resources and 

 land resource projects. Lots of reports came out of that, 

 not many papers. In fact, I must say I'm disappointed with 

 Peter Rogers in that he has not ever established much of a 



