# The Punjab canal colonies
**पंजाब की नहर बस्तियाँ**

- Canonical page: https://indianepics.online/event/canal-colonies-1885/
- Chapter: [Crown and the freedom struggle](https://indianepics.online/chapter/raj.md)
- Track: evidence (archaeology and documents)
- When: 1885 CE – 1947 CE
- Where: Lyallpur (Faisalabad), Punjab (Pakistan) (31.4187, 73.0791)
- Tags: colonial, trade

## Summary

From 1885 canals turn the dry bars of western Punjab into nine planned colonies; canal-irrigated land grows from under 3 million to about 14 million acres.

1885 से नहरें पश्चिमी पंजाब के सूखे बारों को नौ नियोजित बस्तियों में बदलती हैं; नहरों से सींची ज़मीन 30 लाख एकड़ से कम से बढ़कर लगभग 1.4 करोड़ एकड़ हो जाती है।

## Account

Between 1885 and 1947 the Punjab government built nine canal colonies on what it classed as crown waste between the rivers. The first was Sidhnai in the 1880s, the largest the Chenab Colony of 1892 to 1905, with over two million acres, and the last Nili Bar from 1926. Imran Ali puts the rise in canal-irrigated area, excluding the princely states, at from under 3 million to around 14 million acres. Lyallpur was laid out as the Chenab Colony's market town.

Land was given out as peasant, civil and military grants and for horse breeding. Ali argues that the colonies served political and military ends first: rewards for the rural elite and for the army's recruiting grounds, with development second. The semi-nomadic Janglis of the Sandal Bar lost their grazing grounds to the settlers.

The colonies made Punjab the great wheat exporter of the late Raj and put its surplus in West Punjab. At Partition they fell to Pakistan, and their non-Muslim settlers, many of them from the eastern districts, had to go back east. Ali's verdict is growth without social change.

## Sources

- Ali, The Punjab Under Imperialism, 1885-1947 (Princeton, 1988) — https://press.princeton.edu/node/15733
- Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, review of Ali — https://pide.org.pk/research/imran-ali-the-punjab-under-imperialism-1885-1947-princeton-princeton-university-press-1988-ix-264-pp-49-50-hardback/


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