Dams & colonialism

WATER has long functioned as a colonial device rather than merely a natural resource. In the 1800s, the British started one of the largest water infrastructure projects, consisting of barrages, dams, and canals, under the guise of development, but in reality laying the foundations for Pakistan’s contemporary water crises. Having one of the largest canal irrigation systems globally came at the expense of perpetually altering the course of the river, leading to natural disasters, or rather man-made design disasters. At the heart of this transformation was exploitation for irrigation purposes. Because if it weren’t for colonial engineering driven by their overwhelming desire to take, how else would they have managed to extract as much water from the Indus as possible? How else would the commercialisation of agriculture have been so lucrative? How else would the river have been used as a colonial device for the subjugation of indigenous people and the creation of an underclass?

The world currently has more than 58,000 dams. As these dams near their 50–100- year life cycle, upon collapsing, they can release up to 8,300 cubic kilometres of water. Collapsing is not a problem (yet). In Pakistan, the impacts are already visible. From the sediment starvation of the Indus delta to the repeated flooding exacerbated by embankments and canal congestion, dams like Tarbela and Mangla have reshaped hydrological rhythms while displacing communities and degrading ecosystems. Manchhar Lake, once a freshwater body supporting livelihoods, has effectively become a toxic sink for agricultural run-off.

While dams have facilitated Pakistan in storing water, a largely unaddressed problem is one of sedimentation. A study by researchers from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health estimated that by 2050, the world’s major dams will have lost more than a quarter of their storage capacity. In the face of catastrophic flooding, the solution cannot simply be to build more dams, but to actually account for massive long-term implications. Such infrastructure is rendered dangerous if it becomes the problem it was designed to initially solve.

We fail to reimagine water as a living system.

The deeper violence of damification, however, lies not only in infrastructure but also in ontology. The trifecta of capitalism, colonialism and economic productivity has fundamentally reduced water from a living entity embedded in social and spiritual life to a transactional artefact. Colonial engineering was not limited to infrastructure; it extended to relationships. People’s relationship with water changed from one of materiality and sociality to one of a largely transactional nature. As ‘superior’ scientific Western knowledge trumped that of the indigenous, Pakistan also fell down a rabbit hole that severed water from lived relationships and redefined it through control and calculation.

The paradox becomes sharper when colonial and neocolonial institutions continue to fund dam construction in Pakistan while actively decommissioning dams in their own countries. Under the rhetoric of a water scarcity crisis, China and the US have sandwiched Pakistan in a self-perpetuating debt cycle. While narratives of ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ are often oversimplified, the structural reality remains: money is often intentionally lent under the façade of unsustainable infrastructure projects to convert debt into geopolitical influence. The strings attached to funding such infrastructure are the very strings used to turn the country into a geopolitical puppet.

Institutions like the World Bank remain complicit in advancing this agenda. Most recently, the bank ap­­proved one of the costliest dams — the Ro­­gun dam in Tajikistan. By claiming to be at the forefront of ‘nat­ure-smart’ developm­ent, it is ironic that this project will destroy ecologies that are in violation of the bank’s own environmental and social standards, revealing the gap between rhetoric and practice. Thus, the dam, billed as the world’s tallest, may plunge Tajikistan into unsustainable debt, leading to the weaponisation of developmental projects ultimately for the sake of control and dependency.

Pakistan’s story of dam-building exposes a deeper contradiction at the heart of modern development: the belief that water can be endlessly controlled without consequences. The crisis is not simply one of scarcity, but of imagination too. By bending the river to our will through inherited colonial logic, we fail to reimagine water as a living system intertwined with history, ecology and people. As water continues to be treated as a resource that is rendered legitimate through its utility and optimality, Pakistan will continue to mistake damification for progress, while living through its consequences as ‘damnification’.

The writer is an economics student at Lums.

efaaman7@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, April 19th, 2026

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