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here. The Indus is a wild river, a big river, that rises in 

 the Himalayas somewhere back in here. It carries a large 

 load of silt from the Himalayas. It was hardly developed at 

 all until you got way down here into the Sind. On this side 

 of the river is a large desert, the Thar Desert [spells it] . 

 Then coming into it are rivers coming from Afghanistan whose 

 names I can't remember now, but there are two or three 

 rivers from Afghanistan that come into the right bank of the 

 Indus . 



On the left bank of the Indus there are five streams, 

 the Jhelum, the Chenab, the Beas, the Sutlej, and the Ravi 

 rivers. The fact that there are five of them gives the name 

 to the Punjab. "Pun" means simply five and "jab" means 

 river. So Punjab is the Land of the Five Rivers. Beas, 

 Sutlej, Ravi, Chenab, and Jhelum, all of which come into the 

 Indus down here together at the northern end of the Sind, in 

 a region called Bahawalpur. The Sind is down here below 

 Bahawalpur. 



These streams, including the Indus, have been used for 

 irrigation for thousands of years. The so-called Harype or 

 Mohenjedan civilization, 2000 B.C., one of the earliest 

 civilizations, about the same age as the beginning of the 

 Chinese civilization, had what are called inundation canals. 

 They simply dug ditches from the river and during the 

 monsoon season these canals would fill up. They would 

 irrigate a zone about ten miles wide on each side of the 

 river. 



During the nineteenth century, beginning about 1880, 

 the British started putting in what they called barrages. A 

 barrage is a low dam that doesn't really store much water, 

 but raises the level of the river. The river is flowing 

 like this [gestures movement] , you put this barrier in the 

 way and in order for the river flow to continue the river 

 has to rise, so it flows over the barrage or through the 

 barrage, through the gates of the barrage, or around the end 

 in some cases. 



In general, it's a low dam going all the way across 

 the river with gates in it. Then during the monsoon or 

 whenever the river was high, these barrages would divert 

 water into big canals, huge canals. Some of the canals were 

 as big as the Colorado River, 15 million acre feet. Mostly 

 they are not quite that big, but 10 million acre feet was a 

 typical flow, the amount of water that they'd carry during 

 the course of the year. They were as much as a hundred 

 yards wide and about 10 feet deep. You come across these 

 things, it's just like coming to a river. 



Then the canals would branch off into what they called 

 tributitaries and then into minor canals. I guess the 

 tributaries were the last ones. Major canals, minor 

 canals, tributaries, and then the actual diversions into 

 the farmers' fields. 



For the diversions into the farmers' fields, the water 

 was taken from the distributaries through a small gate about 

 two or three feet wide that the farmers managed themselves. 



