The Upper Bari Doab Canal takes the Ravi at Madhopur and was the first major British irrigation work in Punjab, begun in 1850 and opened in 1859, ten years after annexation.
It was built partly to employ and settle the disbanded Sikh army and partly to secure revenue from the Bari Doab, and it watered Gurdaspur, Amritsar and Lahore districts.
In 1947 the headworks stayed in India and a large part of the command area went to Pakistan, which is the specific fact behind the water dispute of 1948 and the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960.
The canal is still the backbone of irrigation in Gurdaspur and Amritsar districts.
Its construction is the point at which the British administration in Punjab moved from consolidating a conquest to remaking the landscape, and everything from the canal colonies to the Green Revolution follows the method it established.
The canal opened in 1859, planned and carried out by the engineers Joseph Henry Dyas and James Crofton, and it watered the Bari Doab between the Beas and the Ravi.
The boundary of 1947 cut it. India held the headworks at Madhopur and Pakistan held much of the command, and the stoppage of water in April 1948 is the incident from which the long negotiation over the rivers began.
It still runs, and its distributaries are the irrigation of Gurdaspur and Amritsar. Its inspection bungalows and bridges are the oldest working infrastructure in the state.