In recent decades, dams have come to personify “nation-building” (Roy) - the bigger, the better. In developing countries, economic growth is often predicated on the expansion of infrastructure. That’s the mantra of Pakistan’s political elite.

Our current economic structures define economic growth as an exponential growth of gross domestic product (GDP), the goods and services produced in a country in a given period of time. In an agro-based country the pursuit of exponential economic growth means increasing crop cultivation, even in places nature does not allow. Man-made irrigation has turned swathes of arid, dry land into flourishing crops, and to feed this irrigation system in the context of Pakistan’s geography, water storage is necessary. The elite at the national and transnational levels present mega-dams as the solution to this necessity.

In Pakistan, Punjabi officials and the Punjabi-dominated army are considered as the political elite of the country. On the transnational level, I use the term political elite to refer to international development agencies, particularly the World Bank, and First World diplomats. I also include multinational companies in this world of elitism. Although they frame their mega-dam proposition in economic terms of GDP, agricultural growth, megawatts of power produced, etc, their driving force is political and economic self-interest.

This paper will examine how and why the project came to be proposed and built, the role played by the global elite in choosing this project, and the consequences it had for the politically marginalized communities. The framework of this essay borrows the following features of Political Economy Analysis (PEA), as delineated by Alex Duncan and Gareth Williams in their journal article ”Making Development Assistance More Effective Through Using Political-Economy Analysis: What Has Been Done and What Have We Learned?”:

• Emphasizing the centrality of politics
• Identifying underlying factors that shape the political process
• Recognizing that development agencies are political actors

The Indus River is the bloodline of Pakistan. The people of the Pakistani provinces of Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhthunkhwa, Azad Kashmir and Balochistan all depend on its flow. Most of the major cities are near the Indus banks, and its tributary of Chenab, which itself has four major tributaries of Jhelum, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej. These flow down the fertile province of Punjab, feeding the crops that form the backbone of the economy. They converge into the Indus River, in the lower province of Sindh, before flowing out to the Arabian Sea as shown in this map of the country (Ahmad & Lodrick).

The Indus River and its major tributaries are all snow-fed. This drastically affects the rivers’ flow seasonally: during the winter months (December to February) it is at the lowest, rising in spring and early summer (March to June) and flooding over in the monsoon season (July to September). In some places, there are destructive flash floods. All the rivers originate in the northern hills and mountains of the country. Therefore, their flow is stronger upstream whereas downstream Sindh receives the least surface flow, from a river exhausted by the greedy plains of Punjab. Evaporation and seepage significantly reduce the flow volume as well (“Indus River [river, Asia]”).

“The Indus basin has the largest irrigated area on any one river system” in the world (Sinha). The canals that divert water out of the river are a source of livelihood for thousands of farmers. Without this artificial supply of water, many lands cannot grow any crops. Of the 20 million hectares of cultivated land in the Indus basin, 17 million hectares depend on irrigation (Gill & Sampath, p. 77).

In Pakistan, dams are considered the mainstay of irrigation. They store water in the high flow and rainy seasons for crops that are grown in the drier winter season. These are known as the rabi crops, which are cultivated from November to April. Wheat, the staple food of the country, is the most prominent rabi crop. Kharif is the second type of crop or season of cultivation, lasting from May to November. It includes the cash crops of cotton, rice and sugarcane (“Encyclopedia of the Nations”). These are water-intensive crops, which combine with irrigation inefficiency to leave little water for rabi, thus serving as an excuse for building dams. Never mind the reconstitution of crops grown or lack of irrigation efficiency enhancement. By the 1990s average delivery efficiency from canal head to the root zone was an unimpressive 35-40 percent (Faruqee & Hussain, p. 569).

For the urban population and industries, the river is a source of energy and drinking water. Hydropower is Pakistan’s second largest source of electricity (Sinha). Thus big dams are common in the country, although they tend to be politically contentious. Not only is there tension over sharing the Indus between Pakistan and India, there is also political conflict within the country, especially between the provinces of Punjab and Sindh. 

Even though irrigation in Pakistan surpasses the country’s creation in 1947, dating back to 6000 years, ’modern’ canal irrigation was introduced during British colonization (Rahman, p. 364, 368). The partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan fractured this irrigation network that spilled over on both sides.

The drawing of borders was a rushed affair, resulting in a flawed final boundary that exacerbated the split of water headworks, a hydraulic structure that diverts water from a river to a canal (“Canal Headworks”). The infamous Radcliffe Award, which drew the border between India and Pakistan, granted the Ferozepore headwork to India even though it belonged to a Muslim majority tehsil, an administrative division (Michel, p. 178). As a result India could control the flow of water to Punjab. This worked greatly in favor of India and its certain leaders who viewed Pakistan as a temporary entity, which they were determined to bring back to India by wrecking its economy and making it vulnerable in any way possible (Michel, p. 223). While there are plausible justifications behind this grant, attention needs to be paid to a strategic alternative that was missed.

Sir Cyril Radcliffe who drew this partition line had never been to India and was hardly familiar with the geopolitical realities of the region. He was chosen for the task because of his intellectual reputation and because his lack of familiarity with the subcontinent made him an unbiased decision maker. While it is true that he was impartial toward both the new HinduMuslim nations, he did have a bias in favor of the British interests. His loyalties with the British government were deeply embedded through his experience during the war as the director general of the British Ministry of Information. This former position had explicitly exposed him to the goals and interests of the British crown (Chester).

Thus it is arguable that Radcliffe deliberately left the former British colony in an unstable position. He could have awarded the entire Ferozepore headwork, which admittedly served India as well, to balance the Indian control over water flowing from the Madhopur headworks into Pakistan. Such a scenario would have given both countries an equal bargain tool of control of water flowing to the other’s land (Michel, p. 181). There may never have been the need for the 1960 Indus Water Treaty, which pushed forward mega-dam projects for the development of Pakistan’s storage facilities, in order to offset its reliance on Indian controlled water

However with all headworks granted to India, Pakistan as a downstream state came to be dependent on Indian goodwill. This proved to be unreliable as early as 1948, when the river flow was breached by India. On April 1, 1948 the Indian government disrupted the flow of water from canals on its side, cutting off water to 5.5 percent of the sown area and almost 8 percent of the cultivated area in Pakistan (Ahmad). This Indian control of canals that fed Pakistan was dangerous because according to William Iliff, the Vice President of the World Bank and International Development Association from 1956-1962: “‘[i]f Pakistan was deprived of her canal water from the Indus system, the whole of west Pakistan would really become a desert’” (Alam, p. 342).

At the occurrence of this incident, the Pakistani leadership realized the extent to which the country was dependent on the Indian controlled Sutlej River. The whole ordeal may have been avoided were it not for K.B Sheikh Abdul Hamid, the Secretory of Irrigation from Punjab, who withdrew the complaint against the Ferozepore headwork award to India, from Committee B. Committee B was an arbitral tribunal set up by Radcliff, with government officials from each department, one from both countries, to settle any problems that arose from the partition.

ies, to settle any problems that arose from the partition. Hamid, the Pakistani nominee for the Irrigation Department, was swayed by his former colleague Mr. Kanwar Sen, the Indian nominee, to withdraw the issue of water apportionment (Kazi, p. 25-26). In doing so, he deprived Pakistan of getting a chance to regain some of its control over water that flowed through the country but originated in India. The bargaining chip was lost. Hamid let his personal relations with Sen get in the way of his countrys interest.

India let the water flow to Pakistan till precisely the end date of the Committee on March 31, 1948. The next day the flow was blocked; Pakistan had been tricked into not only accepting Indian goodwill but also giving up its right to the water of rivers Sutlej and Ravi, at least according to Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian Prime Minister (Kazi, p. 26). He agreed to reopen the canals only on the condition of monetary compensation by Pakistan for what was now Indian waters. Pakistan disputed this claim, by stating that its payments were for the costs of operating and maintaining the irrigation works and not for the water itself (Michel, p. 202).

Nevertheless, this arrangement was a temporary solution that was reached on May 4, 1948 when Inter-Dominion Agreement was signed, whereby India agreed to open water supplies for irrigation in Pakistan until the later developed alternative water resources (Ahmad). It also called for continued talks between the two countries but these were largely unsuccessful (Alam, p. 344). These political developments, motivated by India’s national self-interest, thus contributed to the increasing need for storage facilities in Pakistan.

The water dispute came to the attention of the World Bank, when both India and Pakistan applied for loans to develop water resources on the Sutlej River. The Bank had to turn down these projects, despite their economic feasibility, due to the continued political dispute over the river (Alam, p. 344). In 1949, when India requested the Bank to finance the multipurpose Bakhra-Nangal project on Jhelum River, Pakistan objected by highlighting the late water controversy. Similarly, when Pakistan sought finance from the Bank for the Kotri barrage project on Indus River, India cited the same reason for its objection.

These disrupted projects hindered socioeconomic development hence obstructing the World Bank’s stated mission to “reduce global poverty” (“About Us”). More critically, this situation threatened the Bank’s ability to raise money from donor countries, which could become skeptical of the agency’s effectiveness, in the light of two of its largest potential customers caught in such a political deadlock (Mason & Asher, p. 612).

However, a closer examination of the World Bank’s intervention in the water dispute between India and Pakistan shows that it was driven by a prominent American public figure, David E. Lilienthal. He was the founding director of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and later the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. In the 1950s, he exported his ideas of development internationally, with the subcontinent serving as one of his first targets (Neuse, blurb).

Lilienthal toured the Indus Valley in 1951 as a private citizen, and soon published an article in the Collier, offering a solution to the dispute and emphasizing that the matter be dealt technically rather than politically. He suggested developing the Indus system as a single unit, modeled after the TVA, which would be operated by both India and Pakistan. He directly called the World Bank to attention by proposing that “perhaps” the Bank would help the two countries in jointly financing the project (Mason & Asher, p. 612). Lilienthal was a “good friend” of Eugene R. Black, President of the then World Bank (D’Souza, p. 165), whom the President along with Davidson Sommers, the general counsel for the World Bank, met with on August 8, 1951 to discuss his proposals. It was Lilienthal himself who suggested to Black to forward these proposals directly to Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan, the prime ministers of India and Pakistan respectively (Michel, p. 225).

At this time, Lilienthal was transitioning from his public service career to the private sector by joining Lazard, an international financial advisory, asset management, and investment firm (Albinia, p. 49). He made it known to his new employer that it was a “must” that he “accumulate a substantial sum of money in the next ten years”. Lilienthal was not to be disappointed; by 1955 he earned a yearly income of over $110,000 in addition to $1.5 million worth of Lazard stock, in exchange for his economic development expertise and political contacts around the world (Phillips-Fei & Zelizer, p. 113).

Lilienthal’s prominence in the public sector, and influential contacts such as Nehru, the then Prime Minister of India with whom he stayed during his Indus Basin visit to India, added weight to his article. He was effectively using his Lazard partner’s advice to capitalize on his “brilliant name” to open new markets for the company (Phillips-Fei & Zelizer, p. 112). In September 1951, President Black endorsed his friend’s proposal by citing it in his letter to the prime ministers of Pakistan and India. He offered the bait of qualified staff and finance to gain the favor of the two bitterly opposed countries (Mason & Asher, p. 612).

It was in this context that the World Bank got involved in assisting talks between the two nations. The interim negotiations, however, could not maintain the envisioned focus on engineering and technicality nor the plan for an integrated Indus Basin Project. The latter would have required India to accept partition “as a final and permanent thing” as advised by Lilienthal. However, as previously mentioned, certain Indian leaders were not ready to accept Pakistan as a permanent entity and thus waited for the weak states implosion. Also, India could develop its water infrastructure at a much lesser cost on its own by focusing its energy on the Bhakra-Beas-Rajasthan Project (Michel, pp. 197, 223).

Pakistan was conscious of India’s attempt to derail the country out of its new existence. The whole movement for a separate state for Muslims was premised on the Muslim leadership’s mistrust of Hindu-dominated Indian politics in safeguarding the rights and interests of the minority population (“Jinnah”). In the late years of colonial India, the Muslims, who were now in Pakistan, were repeatedly betrayed or marginalized by the Hindu politicians. The Muslim experiences from the Cabinet Mission, Mountbatten-Menon negotiations, and the Partition massacres were deeply embittering. The canal closure of 1948 was the most obvious incident to convince Pakistanis that they could not trust India with their irrigation water, something a joint project would require (Michel, p. 223).

Consequently, the talks quickly spilled over to “identity politics” (D’Souza, p. 165), and led to the Indus Water Treaty of 1960, in which the project was split between the two rival countries (Iyer, p. 3140). The World Bank had essentially stepped in the middle of two countries’ governances by striving to establish a unified administration over their water resources, to which end it failed due to political mistrust between its subjects (D’Souza, p. 165).

Ben Orlove, an anthropologist at Columbia University, and Stephen C Canton, also an anthropologist, warn that the term governance obscures “the debates and conflicts over (the) goals and values of water (which) lead us to the sphere of politics” (405). A perfect case study of this phenomenon can be found in the political tension between Punjab and Sindh. It is assumed that the national governance of Pakistan negotiated and signed the Indus Water Treaty but a close examination shows that it was an act of a subset of the governing body of the country.

One of the main provisions of the Treaty was to allocate the three western rivers of Indus (Jhelum, Chenab and Indus) to Pakistan and the three eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas and Sutlej) to India (Iyer, p. 3140). The negotiations that led to this agreement were fraught with political tensions between Punjab and the downstream province of Sindh. The former was preoccupied with diplomacy and foreign affairs, while the latter feared losing water flow to India. The Punjabi delegators, assured of control over water for itself given its national upstream position, were full of “desperation” to come to an agreement (Kazi, p. 31). Meanwhile Sindh actively opposed allocating any of the Indus Rivers to India because it recognized the shortfall in flow that would follow such an agreement (p. 33).

The original Pakistani delegation had fair representation of all provinces, with their respective interests, but their bickering undermined and prolonged the negotiation process. The opposing voices were soon silenced when in October 1955 the four provinces were merged into one province despite strong resistance from Sindh. The One Unit now represented West Pakistan while present day Bangladesh was East Pakistan, under which a new delegation was formed, known as the Indus Basin Advisory Board (IBAB). The IBAB was fully appropriated by Punjabis, who were given all the seats. Sindh was therefore systematically excluded from the deliberations that took place henceforth. This was not the first instance of Punjab playing bully politics towards Sindh; it was a continuation of a historical pattern stretching back to colonial times (Kazi, p. 22 & 31).

When the British developed irrigation systems in colonial India, they anticipated water disputes between the provinces and hence set up an India Irrigation Commission (1901-1903). The commission made it mandatory for Punjab to seek the permission of lower riparian Sindh before undertaking any projects on the Indus Rivers. The following years, Punjab and Sindh went back and forth on projects through the British intermediary Viceroy of India, who often recognized the threat to the interests of Sindhis (Kazi, p. 22).

The repeated water disputes induced the British to set up Rao Commission in 1941, which sought to find a permanent solution between the two provinces. Sindh took this as an opportunity to file its complaints against completed and ongoing irrigation projects of Government of Punjab, on the Indus and its tributaries. These included the Haveli Project, feeders for water transference, and Thal Project that had formerly been rejected by Viceroy Lord Chelmsford (Kazi, p. 23-4). Unfortunately, the agreement that came out of the commission was lost in partition and never came to be ratified.

There were other grievances that Sindh held against Punjab. For instance, after partition Punjabi and mohajir (migrants) bureaucrats and military officers were allocated 1.32 million acres of agricultural land, almost half of the newly irrigated land created by various barrages. Sindhis were treated like second class citizens in their own province; they were continually under represented in services, business and law enforcing agencies. Karachi, a cultural and financial center of the province, was made a federal capital. The Urdu language was imposed on their higher education system, replacing the local language of Sindhi. This was viewed as an act of “Punjabi imperialism,” to borrow the words of Syed G.M (Waseem & Hayat, p. 729).

Another state action informed by a transnational body was the decision to construct the large Tarbela Dam. This too was a product of the Indus Water Treaty but in the case of Tarbela, the most influential and powerful institution was the World Bank. As Ghulam Mueenuddin, Pakistan’s chief negotiator, explained: “The biggest factor was the moral pressure of the Bank. Both of us [India and Pakistan] were terribly reluctant to appear before the world and say we were not prepared to accept the Bank’s advice” (“India and Pakistan”).

To compensate Pakistan for the loss of the flow of three perennial rivers to India, the World Bank proposed to invest in an Indus Basin Project (IBP), which included Tarbela, Mangla and Chashma dams, six barrages, eight new canals and improvements in three existing canals. In anticipation of these development projects, WAPDA, the federal Water and Power Development Authority, was created in 1958 as a semi-autonomous body. Its purpose was to coordinate and provide a unified direction to the development schemes in Water and Power Sectors, which were previously under the respective Electricity and Irrigation Department of the Provinces (“WAPDA”). This allowed the government to consolidate its power at the center, and undermine the political power of provinces with minority populations.

An Indus Basin Development Fund (IBDF) of $895 million was established to finance the IBP (World Commission on Dams, p.111). $541 million of the total fund was in the form of grants from the “friendly Governments” of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, West Germany, Australia and New Zealand. India’s compensatory grant - for gaining the right to the three rivers - amounted to $174 million and the remaining $150 million was covered by loans (Michel, p. 248). A large infrastructure project with such a huge and largely free budget was hardly something the young Pakistan could pass up on.

However, the scale of the project opened the way for corruption, and directly benefited contractors and officials who could make big commissions. As Peter Bosshard, the Policy Director of a grassroots nonprofit International Rivers points out, large infrastructure projects, like Tarbela, are prone to corruption due to their complexity, capital intensity, and high cost (Bosshard & Lawrence).

The magnitude of the project put Pakistanis at a disadvantage. They did not have enough qualified engineers or the required technology to carry out the project on their own. It is also argued that Pakistan was under a time constraint; it needed to keep pace with the growing population (Michel, p. 360). As a result the Indus Basin Project (IBP) created a lucrative market for foreign contractors, particularly consulting firms.

Since its inception in 1958, WAPDA tied itself to the Harza Engineering Company International of Chicago. The company served as a general consultant for both water and power development, including the IBP. Pakistan imported its regulatory work by making Harza responsible for overviewing the work of other consultants before its submission to WAPDA. This responsibility, combined with Harza’s assignment to prepare a master plan for development, opened the door for this American company to maintain its interests (Michel, p. 358-359).

In the case of the Tarbela Dam, the most prominent consulting firm was also American: the Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthyStratton (TAMS) company of New York. They were former consultants to the World Bank during the Treaty negotiations, who were tasked to design the dam for Pakistan (Michel, p. 358). TAMS also contracted documents for the project and supervised the construction work (“WAPDA Hydel Generation”).

Foreign construction companies made huge profits through the decision to make this mega-dam. The Tarbela Dam project was “the world’s largest single contract for the construction of civil works”, priced at $623 million. WAPDA gave the contract to the Tarbela Dam Joint Venture, which was a group of three Italian and three French heavy construction companies. Later, five German and two Swiss contractors joined the group as well, making up a European thirteen member consortium led by Impregilo, an Italian firm (“WAPDA Hydel Generation”). The payment to these foreign firms, in effect, returned the grant money to the first world. In fact the contract was in excess of the $541 million grant.

The Tarbela Dam has come at a high environmental cost. For instance, “the tail end of Indus receives so little water that today Sindh’s agriculture faces extinction. Further reduction of water will increase salinity, land erosion and sea-flooding that will severely damage the Indus delta” (Sering). This environmental problem is ripe with political tension as well as economic and social consequences. It is what fuels Sindh’s grievances with the Government of Punjab and its opposition to dam projects. “Islamabad’s diversions of water to upstream communities with ties to the government are inflaming sectarian loyalties and stoking unrest in the lower downstream region of Sindh” (Wheeler).

The government generally focuses on macro-level goals and tends to ignore the locals who get impacted by dam projects, at a micro-level. For instance, the locals as individual dwellers of Tarbela were excluded from the decision making process of the dam, in the late 1960s. Even after the signing of the project that made WAPDA the active authority, the government did not exercise public participation. In 2000 the World Commission on Dams consulted 900 individuals who were affected by the Tarbela Dam and their consensus was that they were “never consulted about the development of the [Tarbela] project or given alternatives to achieve the same objective” (“World Commission on Dams”, p. 309).

The dam project submerged one hundred and twenty agricultural communities, displacing ninety six thousand people, most of whom were subsistence farmers. The communities were not resettled together, disrupting their old social order. The set compensation criteria discriminated against small landowners (plots lesser than 0.2 hectares/0.5 acres of irrigated land or 0.8 hectares/2 acres of rain-fed land) who were eligible for cash compensation only, while two thirds of the affected population qualified for agricultural replacement land. “The negotiations and discussions excluded women and the landless” (Bennett & McDowell, p. 39). Those who depended on the river for their livelihood, but did not necessarily live in Tarbela, were also extremely disadvantaged, namely the fishermen, boatmen and zarkash (gold panners). They had no say or legal rights to compensation (Bennett & McDowell, p. 39).

The actual resettlement was a political stunt. The government of Sindh refused to release “65 percent of the allocated land” (Bennett & McDowell, p. 39). On paper, some fictitious names were recorded to evidence the compensated.Those who were fortunate enough to actually receive compensation obtained only partial dues; they were previous owners of 100s of acres of good quality land, for which they received 4 acres (World Commission on Dams, p. 367).

It has been over three decades since the dam was built, but many of the dislocated are still struggling for full compensation of the land they lost to the Tarbela Dam. Their entire lives have been spent on recovering from a loss that they were forced to incur in the name of national progress. There are currently 500 outstanding cases of those affected by the those affected by the Tarbela Dam Project and by the smaller, Ghazi Barotha Project that are stuck in litigation in courts across the country, including the Supreme Court. It is an issue that has continued to haunt WAPDA, which in April 2012 set up an independent and impartial Resettlement Claim Commission (“Commission Constituted”).

The injustice of the compensation process is made worse by the fact that resettlement was imposed by the government on the local people. The decision to build the Tarbela Dam was made in the international and (Punjabi) national arena but its negative consequences were felt by the locals, both the upstream farmers/landowners who were uprooted from their land as well as the downstream Sindhi farmers who suffered from the decline of water flow and silt deposit and, the fishermen whose catch dropped (World Commission on Dams, p. 309).

Most of the agricultural population of Tarbela was relocated to townships similar to the rural Chinese who were moved to towns to make way for the recent Three Gorges Dam (Up the Yangtze). This move to urban centers had a profound impact on the displaced, as it changed their waterworld, the totality of social domains that are informed by water in a given society (Orlove & Caton, p. 403). Interviews, with people who were displaced by Tarbela, conducted thirty years later show how long lasting the impact has been. Rafaqat Ali Khan, who moved to Karachi after being evicted from Tarbela related:

[To create] an alternative to Tarbela is not possible. The people there followed a collective pattern of life. They would work the whole day but in the evening you would see them in the hujra [traditional meeting place for men] sharing information with one another, and one another’s problems, too. Here we don’t have it; everybody is part of a machine...they have to work as laborers...No one has time to share the problems of others...There is no such thing [as the hujra] here. (Bennett & McDowell, p. 46)

This quote touches on how locals may not see urbanization and industrialization as “development”. Many locals would rather be self-sufficient subsistence farmers and live in small communities, where they have a strong social and safety network (Bennett & McDowell, p. 46). They would rather depend on a river than on money. Also, for the rural locals in Sindh, the dam has resulted in the depletion of the natural resources of the Indus such as water, fish, and silt, rendering their farmland or fishing grounds unproductive. Consequently they are forced to migrate to Karachi, a large metropolitan that has a population of over 10 million people. They come in as environmental refugees who struggle to find jobs and end up living in lawless slums (Pearce, p. 32).

However it is misleading to homogenize the experiences and views of the local peoples. There are also narratives of the displaced who found the move to a city liberating, both economically and socially. These were often the people from marginalized groups such as the landless and women. A city gave them the opportunity to secure a job and become economically independent or to acquire an education that allowed for upward mobility. Women, from both poor and rich families of Tarbela, especially prized access to education; it empowered them to work and/or take care of themselves when the men they depended on became jobless or drug addicts. However even those who have benefited from their relocation feel a deep sense of loss that no amount of money or public service can erase (Bennett & McDowell, p. 52 & 57).

The average rural Pakistani, in general, loses out in the scheme of mega-dam projects. So who wins? The Punjabi political elite that has captured a foreign aid market for itself and First World “allies” who funnel millions of dollars towards Pakistan’s “development”. Foreign companies are another big winner in this situation, earning millions of dollars worth of contracts. Meanwhile the World Bank serves as a platform for the political and business elite of the world to capture and maintain their interests.

The interests of these elite groups are political, which in the context of the Tarbela Dam can be understood in three ways. The control over Indus Rivers through the construction of this dam was used as a political bargaining chip; as an excuse for aid-imperialism; and as a national top-down structure. The elites vested interests around the Tarbela Dam are also largely economic. The international dam industry is hugely profitable, with a value of 20 billion dollars a year. And the beneficiaries are the same everywhere, as Arundhathi Roy a social activist for the most marginalized Indians states in her famous essay, The Greater Common Good:

If you follow the trails of big dams the world over, wherever you go—China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, Guatemala—you’ll rub up against the same story, encounter the same actors: the Iron Triangle (dam jargon for the nexus between politicians, bureaucrats and dam construction companies), the racketeers who call themselves International Environmental Consultants (who are usually directly employed by or subsidiaries of dam builders), and, more often than not, the friendly, neighbourhood World Bank.

By working as a network to assist in each others greed for money and political power, this global elite circle creates adversity and environmental havoc for the masses, particularly for those who are politically marginalized. They disguise profit making as national development, which often comes at the cost of destruction of livelihood, homes, and a way of life of those at the very bottom.

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