56 



They immediately saw the virtue of the tube wells. Our 

 recommendation was that there should be these so-called climate 

 controlled reclamation projects, so-called ""scrappy" areas of one 

 million acres which should be pushed one at a time by the 

 government, drilling a thousand tube wells, bringing in fertilizer 

 and better seeds and agricultural extension and the works. 



The farmers drilled 70,000 tube wells all by themselves! 

 And the reason that they did was, the wells were so profitable. 

 You could get two crops instead of one. The water was under their 

 control. They didn't have to bribe some damned engineer to get 

 the water. They could use the water when and where they wanted to 

 use it. It made all the difference in the world to have those 

 wells. 



Not all the farmers did it, of course. There were something 

 like 10 million farm families in the Punjab, but a lot of them 

 did, and then they would sell water to their neighbors. It was 

 capitalism not gone wild, but working very well. 



Sharp: And did they use the fertilizer and the new seeds? 



Reveller Sure, of course. They used everything. 



The basic thing that we did was really quite simple. We 

 said — it isn't really quite true but it's pretty true — that 

 the Punjab could be like the Imperial Valley of California. It 

 was one of the great agricultural resources of the earth. All 

 they needed to do was to modernize their technology and it would 

 blossom like the rose. And it did. 



In other words, our main message was a message of self- 

 confidence, there was no real problem. The problem was just 

 in^rove your technology and take advantage of the water. 



There were many different aspects of this. One was that we 

 tried to make economic analyses. Bob Dorfman particularly, and 

 Wally Falcon too, showing what was necessary for a profitable 

 agriculture. That was quite a useful part of the report. 



The problem of the Sind was far different, and I don't think 

 the problem of the Sind has been satisfactorily solved to this 

 day. In the case of the Sind, the groundwater was salty, like it 

 is in the Imperial Valley of California. So you can't use the 

 tube wells, in very large areas at least. You're just pumping 

 salt back up. That means the only kind of drainage you can have 

 that makes sense is what's called horizontal drainage; that is, 

 carry off the irrigation water to someplace else, where you're not 

 farming. 



In principle, it should be carried to the Arabian Sea or to 

 the Thar Desert in the area between India and Pakistan. There 

 were some big lakes in the Sind and you could do something with 

 those lakes. You could mix the water to some extent, the river 

 water with the ground water, and use the mixture. 



Sharp: Just to reduce the salinity? 



Revelle: Yes. But in general, there was no simple solution like there was 

 in the Punjab. The other problem was that the farmers were not 



