62 



The third problem was that the gates for the power 

 turbines and particularly for the release of water for 

 irrigation, the pressure was so great on them that the water 

 came out at very, very high velocity. As I said, ninety to 

 a hundred miles an hour. They eroded too. Then finally the 

 darn tunnels cracked, and they had to do something about 

 that. It was really just a nightmare of problems. 



It had nothing to do with us. We were not involved, 

 but the engineers who were involved had a really terribly 

 difficult time. Harold and I had written a little 

 memorandum arguing for the construction of Tarbella in which 

 we said it would be useful. It provided about 10 million 

 acre feet for irrigation during the dry season. 



Sharp: Was that independently that you did that, or as part of the 

 work of the panel? 



Reveller That was independent. That was after the report. 



The report became sort of a great book in Pakistan. 

 Whenever I would meet anybody, they would say, "Oh, you're 

 the author of the Revelle report. A wonderful book." But 

 90 percent of those people had never read it or even seen 

 it! It's like most great books; they're not really ever 

 read, [laughter] 



Sharp: What would you say was the general effect of the report, as 

 far as Pakistan and the problems it has? 



Revelle: Well, I would say that it's hard to say what the effect was 

 because several things happened more or less at once. The 

 World Bank wrote a much bigger and better report within the 

 next two or three years afterwards, with their enormous 

 resources for doing so, a four-volume work, published in a 

 regular book form, and that's certainly more definitive than 

 our report. As I said, it was just at that time Norman 

 Barlang was producing his new wheat varieties. 



Basically what we did was to support what AID wanted 

 to do anyhow, namely to support the drilling of the tube 

 wells on a million-acre scale. The million acres, we had a 

 good, rational justification for this in terms of this 

 perimeter-versus-area thing, but it turned out you only 

 needed 100,000 acres to have a big enough area. The million 

 acres is just a kind of convenient way of dividing up the 

 land. 



That looked to be like our primary recommendation that 

 you should concentrate on one million acres at a time. Then 

 just go through the whole Punjab and the Sind, 25 million 

 acres over 25 years, one million acres a year. It was a 

 very ambitious, a far too ambitious, program. 



Ghulam Ishaq was against that. His reason was [that] 

 it's impossible politically. He was, as I said, a very 

 intelligent man. He said, "We have to sort of spread the 

 gentle rain evenly over the countryside, the government 

 largesse. If we try to concentrate, all the other people 



