This book springs from an in-depth review of a multi-donor investment in an irrigation and drainage scheme. An economist, an anthropologist, a sociologist, a gender specialist and an irrigation specialist offer an integrated analysis of what the scheme has done, and more particularly, what it has failed to do.

Here is a poignant and informed demonstration of how development investments in Pakistan have failed to address the endemic problem of disparities of power and privilege, and by this neglect have contributed to Pakistan's present poverty crisis.