Colonising of irrigated land and urbanisation of peripheries

Urban expansion, not rural flight, is transforming Punjab’s social landscape

At the suggestion of the Famine Commission appointed by the authorities in London to deal with the recurrent famines in eastern India, the British government would make heavy investments to bring canal water to the dry lands in eastern Punjab and upper Sindh. This would be done by tapping the rivers of the Indus River system. Canals would be built to take the water to the parched land.

The only problem with this approach was finding people who had expertise and were in number to use the irrigated land. For this, the British turned to the farming community in eastern Punjab that used water from the ample groundwater reservoirs. For bringing water, the farmers used rotating buckets that worked on pulleys to bring water to the ground. From the well-heads, water was taken to the fields by small canals.

The community of farmers was not religiously homogeneous. It was made up of Muslims and Sikhs, but not Hindus. But that didn't matter to the British since at that time, the move to free India from British rule had not acquired religious overtones. All that was needed was to give the farmers enough incentives to leave the land they were cultivating, often with the output shared with the owners. The incentive was to own the land they would be brought in to colonise.

For vetting the applicants, the British appointed Settlement Commissioners who maintained extensive records about the people who were settled. These records provided the number of people who were involved. Settlers, however, did not move permanently; they hired local people to farm the land. They saw their main task as selecting the crops to be grown, the method of tilling the soil, and marketing the output.

For the last-named activity, small towns were established that picked up the output, often lending the money in advance to the farmers making the sales. This is the only activity in which the Hindus were involved. Exactly how many people were involved would require serious scholarship of the type I carried out when I worked on the movement of people that resulted from the partition of British India into the independent states of India and Pakistan. The movement of people after independence resulted in the homogenising of religion in both Pakistani and Indian Punjabs.

The Pakistani Punjab became more Muslim, while the proportion of Sikhs in the Indian Punjab changed the politics of the area. This became noticeable when Sikh farmers mounted a noisy movement against the government in New Delhi, headed by the Hindu nationalist Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. He had the Indian parliament pass laws that would allow the entry of outside money into Punjab. There was a noisy demonstration by the Sikh farmers as thousands of them marched towards New Delhi, the Indian capital. This activity forced Modi to withdraw the laws.

The partition of the province of Punjab brought about the movements of the farming community in both directions – Muslim farmers left the Indian parts of the Punjab province and went to Pakistan, while Sikh farmers and Hindu money lenders moved in the opposite direction. It would be safe to assume that, as a result of this population exchange, there was no addition to the number of those living and working in Punjab's and Sindh's rural areas.

The movements of people affecting rural demography are the significant growth in the size of towns and cities serving rural areas. Two good examples of this development are the Punjab cities of Faisalabad and Sargodha. Faisalabad has become a major industrial city using the products of the surrounding agricultural land. Its burgeoning textile industry uses the cotton crops produced in the surrounding rural areas. Sargodha's development as a major area is different: it supplies and sometimes manufactures the inputs needed by the farming community.

The city is behind the rapid development of fruit orchards in the neighbourhood. The city is well on its way to producing and bottling olive oil from the trees grown by the farming community in the area. Some of the oil produced is now being exported. While, as noted above, the movement of millions of people following the departure of the British from their Indian colony and the partition of their colony into the states of Pakistan resulted in a massive increase in the population of Karachi. There was also a notable increase in the population of Hyderabad, a Sindh city not far from Karachi. However, in the major cities of the Punjab province, the loss was compensated by the arrival of the Muslim population.

Urbanisation is occurring not by the large movement of people from rural to urban areas but by the encroachment of the cities on the rural population. Several large cities are moving and absorbing rural people. This type of movement is most visible in Lahore, which now has a population of 10 million people. While the expansion of the city is blocked by the Indian border that runs close to the city on the east, there is noticeable expansion in the other three directions. One doesn't have to go out of Lahore to note how the city is eating away at rural land and absorbing rural people into its economy.

In the most prominent locations, there are large billboards advertising the coming of high-rise buildings outside the city. Once the apartments bring in residents who will be very well-to-do, as they would have paid large sums of money to purchase the new residences, they will need people to work in the service sector. This is the way in which rural people will be turned into urban workers.

Thus far, the discussion about the movement of people in Pakistan has focused on those who have come from the outside (from India and Afghanistan) and those who have moved within the country. It is also important to note the extent of the outflow of people from the country and their interaction with the country of their origin. There are now large Pakistani diasporas in the various countries of the Middle East; in Britain, Spain in Europe; and the United States and Canada in North America.

According to the Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis and Human Resource Development, a bit fewer than 11 million Pakistanis are living abroad, and a large proportion of them are in the Arab oil-producing states. There are also large Pakistani diasporas in two European countries: Britain and Spain. Well-to-do Pakistanis from Gujarat chose Spain as the place where they would like to spend their summer months. Once there, they brought workers from their area of original residence.