48a 



Roger Revelle, "Mission to the Indus." New Scientist 17(1963) 340. 



NtW SCIENTIST (No. 3:6), 



14 F E B R L X R V 



' --o 



r/Iission 



lothe 



ndus 



Ene of the most remarkable 

 ? ercises in international 

 : operation in science has 

 en the work of a panel 

 American scientists who 

 ive studied the irrigation 

 stem in West Pakistan 

 id come up with 

 fr-reaching proposals for 

 iiproving the agriculture 



that country. This 

 ^ccial article is by the 

 hnel's chairman 



Dr Roger Revelle 



iciicc Adviser to llic Secretary oj 

 US Deparinieni oJ the Interior 



S' l%I. President Ayiib Khan, of Pakis- 

 in asked President Kennedy to send a 

 Mip of scientists to study the problem of 

 terlogging and salinity in West Pakistan, 

 ich was liirowing lairge areas of farmland 

 i of cultivation or greatly reducing the 

 Ids. Dr Jerome B. Wicsner, President 

 nned>"s Special Assistant for Science 

 .1 Technology, appointed a panel of 20 

 cialists from many disciplines in the 

 ural, agricultural, engineering and social 

 ;nccj. The panel analysed the problem in 

 ail, aided by graduate students at 

 rvard, where a great deal of digital corn- 

 ting was carried out — indeed some of the 

 dents said that, for a while, the 

 lus river flowed through Cambridge, 

 issachiisetts. President Kennedy recently 

 t our report to President Ayub Khan. In 

 ,ve gave our opinion that waterlogging 



I N D I A 



Figure I. The Indus and its tributaries — an early centre o] civilization, but today o 



"less developed area". 



and salinity must be attacked as part of a 

 broad approach towards a large and rapid 

 increase in agricultural productivity. What 

 began as a study of a specific problem led 

 logically, in our interdisciplinary analysis, 

 10 a plan for the development of West 

 Pakistan, requiring unprecedented elTort 

 from the people of that country. 



When Alexander the Great marched 

 across the wilderness 2300 years ago. and 

 came to the Indus, the greatest river he had 

 ever seen, civilization had already e.\isied 

 there for 2000 years. The river ga\e its 

 name, which simply means "river," to a 

 sub-continent and to a religion (also, by one 

 of the monumental .confusions of history, 

 ic the early inhabitants of the Americas). 



The flood plain of the Indus and its five 

 great tributaries— the Jhchim, the Chenab, 

 the Ravi, the Beas and the .S'utlej— bearing 



the melted snows and monsoon rains froni 

 the Himalayas to water green ribbons of 

 floodland, was naturally a place where 

 farmers would settle and which conqueroW 

 would covet. The last of these, the Bniisn,, 

 worked a transformation "of the land. There 

 had been some great irrigation ^^'°''*^' ^.'' 

 fore, but nothing compared with ''''■' /^Y' 

 rages and 10 000 miles of canals whicn. 

 beginning in the mid-I9th century, '"^ 

 British engineers created in the P""^ 

 and the Sind. British administrator^ c 

 couraged hundreds of thousand^ . 

 farmers and their families to ^^f^l^^^f. 

 into the newly watered lands; each i ^^^ 

 was allocated fifty acre^, and a S"° ^^.^ 

 pattern of villages was built to "^"^.-'l 

 new "canal colonies". . .. jon'^ 



The development of '"'S=»"^" , ?,n,en'«j 

 tinning lodav. Under the Indus bc»' . ,«| 



:4 



