Urbanizing India's frontier: Sriganganagar and canal-town planning on the Indus plains

Irrigation projects implemented by British colonial engineers transformed environment, economy, and society in the Indus basin during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to constructing canals, headworks, and distributaries, colonial officers designed new cities to facilitate administration and global commerce in South Asia's frontier areas. By the 1920s, canal development had formally reached India's princely states and decades of town and regional planning experimentation yielded reproducible planning codes and development strategies that balanced competing impulses. Sriganganagar (Ganganagar), a city of some 250,000 on Rajasthan's northwestern border with Pakistan, illustrates these development schemes, the nexus of town and regional planning in colonial India, and its enduring influence on South Asia's linked urban and regional systems. Like the goddess river with which it shares its name, Ganganagar took many differing forms through its planning and development: as a place of celebration, of production, of modern technological achievement, of ecological and social transformation, of expanding state power, and of ethnic division, imperialism, and repression.