The Punjab canal system was designed by British engineers of the Public Works Department and built by Punjabi labour, and the engineering that came out of it changed irrigation practice worldwide.
Problems solved here for the first time at scale included silt control in unlined canals, the design of falls and regulators, the theory of stable channel dimensions in alluvial soil, and the management of water distribution among cultivators through warabandi.
Gerald Lacey's regime theory, developed from Punjab canal data, is still taught. The Punjab canal manuals were used as models in Egypt, Iraq, Sudan and the American west.
The Punjab Engineering College at Lahore, later moved to Chandigarh, was set up to train the Indian staff of that department.
It is one of the few fields in which colonial Punjab produced knowledge that was exported rather than imported, and the reason is that the problems here were larger than anywhere else.
The canal system is also the single largest physical intervention ever made in this landscape and it is why the region looks the way it does.
The canal system was designed by a small group of Royal Engineers and Public Works Department officers working from the 1850s, and their reports are a body of technical writing of high quality.
The labour was Punjabi and enormous. The Chenab Colony's canals were dug by hand at a scale that has no modern equivalent, and the workforce is not named anywhere.
The Indian engineers came later and the Roorkee college trained them. By the 1930s the design work was largely Indian and the credit in the record still is not.