2026/07/23 by Abdul Aijaz
Social Sciences · Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Water Governance and Infrastructure #Hydropower, Displacement, Environmental Impact #Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development
paper · doi:10.1111/geoj.70109
ABSTRACT Pakistan has the world's largest contiguous irrigation infrastructure in the Indus Basin, which has resulted from more than two hundred years of investment in agrarian development in the arid Indus Plains by colonial and postcolonial states alike. Most of this infrastructural investment happened in the Punjab, where nine canal colonies were settled between 1886 and 1940, bringing more than 14 million lands under plough (Ali 1988, 9). Known as the breadbasket of colonial India prior to 1947 and now postcolonial Pakistan, Punjab hosts more than half the population of the country, which is predominantly rural and agrarian (Khan 2020). This irrigation infrastructure and the agrarian economy dependent on it are threatened by climate change and the resulting water crisis. In this essay, I will trace the history of this hydrosocial arrangement in Pakistan's Punjab province to reveal how this colonial and postcolonial irrigation infrastructural development set up the present moment of crisis instead of enduring development. Based on archival and ethnographic research in a canal colony village in the central Punjab, I explore the geographies of uneven agrarian development in the canal colonies and highlight how the climate crisis is internal to the strategies of development and political control over nature and the native communities. I also highlight the newer strategies of survival adopted by the local communities in the face of global environmental crisis.