The Madhopur headworks take the Ravi for the Upper Bari Doab Canal, begun in 1859.
Punjab's water position since: about 79 per cent of blocks are classified over-exploited. In 18 of 22 districts the water table fell more than a metre a year between 1998 and 2018. Extraction wells went from 192,000 in 1970-71 to 1.38 million in 2011-12. Canal irrigation fell from 58.4 per cent of area to 28 per cent while tubewell irrigation rose from 41.1 to 71.3 per cent.
Every abandoned khoo and rusted Persian wheel in a Punjabi field is a dated artefact of that switch.
The Upper Bari Doab Canal was cut partly to employ the disbanded Khalsa soldiery after 1849 and partly to secure revenue, and it was the first great British irrigation work in Punjab. Its head regulator at Madhopur is the point at which the Ravi stops being a river and becomes an allocation.
In 1947 the works stayed in India and most of the command area went to Pakistan. On 1 April 1948 India stopped the water and Lahore's canals ran dry, which is the incident that made the Indus Waters Treaty necessary twelve years later.
The Ranjit Sagar dam upstream, completed in 2000, now holds the river above the headworks, so what reaches Madhopur is a release schedule rather than a flow. Below the works the Ravi in the dry season is a channel carrying very little.