Lloyd Barrage

Long-nosed Viceroy Lord Willingdon took time off from his troubles with Indian Nationalists last week to go to Sukkur on the Indus, in northwestern India. There on a platform glittering with native princes and staff officers, he threw a switch and opened the flood gates of the biggest irrigation project in the world. With British talent for resonant names it is known as the Lloyd Barrage.

In 1923, when he was Governor of Bombay, Sir George Ambrose Lloyd (later better known as Lord Lloyd, Britain's iron-fisted High Commissioner for Egypt) inaugurated the scheme. Besides two dams which are. respectively, the largest and the second highest in the world, the project includes a network of canals and spillways 6,000 miles long. On it 77,000 men were employed for nine years. It cost $75,000,000 and will irrigate a rainless desert area as big as Massachusetts. Rhode Island and Delaware together. Statisticians figured that the masonry in the Lloyd dam would build a wall six feet high, 15 inches thick and 520 miles long. It should provide farm work for an additional 2,500,000 people.

Immediately after the ceremony Lord Willingdon announced that a knighthood had been awarded to the British designer of the project: Charlton Scott Cholmeley Harrison. Undoubtedly the Lloyd Barrage will do more for the people of northwestern India than anything St. Gandhi has been able to think of, but all its waters could not quench Nationalist pride. India seethed with the news that A. A. Musto, native engineer in charge of construction who spent seven hot summers by the dam site, designed much special machinery, was not rewarded at all.

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