Rahim Yar Khan
Named after a dead prince to avoid railway confusion, Rahim Yar Khan was transformed from desert to Pakistan's cotton crown by the Panjnad Barrage—then positive feedback loops from six sugar mills collapsed cotton, drained the aquifer, and turned a keystone infrastructure project against itself.
The city exists because railway authorities needed to avoid a naming conflict. In 1881, the British built a station at Noshehra, a settlement in the Indus basin that had been continuously inhabited for five millennia under successive names—Aror, Pattan, Phul Wada, Noshehra. But another Nowshera already existed in the northwest with a major rail junction, so Nawab Sadiq Muhammad Khan IV renamed the station after his first son, Rahim Yar Khan, who died two years later at a young age. The railway name consumed the city's identity entirely. This is path-dependence at its most arbitrary: a bureaucratic disambiguation from 1881 still determines what the district's five and a half million people call home.
The land was desert fringe until the British finished the Panjnad Barrage in 1932, harnessing the confluence where Punjab's five rivers merge—the Chenab and Sutlej being the last two to join—into three canals irrigating 1.81 million acres. The barrage functioned as a keystone species introduction: a single piece of infrastructure that restructured the entire ecosystem. Desert became cotton belt. Rahim Yar Khan grew into Pakistan's largest cotton-producing district, with hundreds of thousands of acres under cultivation and over a million bales annually feeding textile mills across Punjab. Then the sugar mills arrived.
Six sugar mills now operate in the district with a combined crushing capacity of 135,000 tonnes per day—the highest concentration in any single district in Pakistan. JDW Sugar Mills alone produces roughly 15 percent of Pakistan's sugar from over 26,000 acres of plantation. The mills triggered a positive feedback loop: guaranteed purchase contracts made sugarcane more profitable than cotton, so farmers switched. More cane attracted more mills. More mills attracted more cane. The result is agricultural resource allocation turned inside out—sugarcane requires 1,500 to 2,000 millimetres of water per hectare, roughly double cotton's needs, and the district now operates tens of thousands of tubewells mining groundwater to compensate for canal shortfalls. Cotton cultivation in the district has collapsed. The ecosystem that the Panjnad Barrage created is being consumed by the organism it fed.
The desert has its own economy. Ninety kilometres east, past the last date palms marking the irrigation fringe, the Cholistan Desert stretches to the Indian border. Over 400 Harappan archaeological sites mark a civilization that flourished when the Hakra River still flowed. Today, UAE and Gulf royals hunt the endangered houbara bustard from private airstrips with 3,200-metre runways capable of receiving the world's largest cargo aircraft. Abu Dhabi has built roads with Arabic-language signposts, schools, hospitals, and housing projects across the desert in exchange for hunting access—a source-sink dynamic where infrastructure flows in and biodiversity flows out. The Derawar Fort, a ninth-century fortress with 40 bastions on the UNESCO tentative list, watches over a landscape where medieval caravan routes now serve as hunting corridors. Rahim Yar Khan sits at the junction of three provinces—Punjab, Sindh, and Balochistan—and at the junction of two resource bargains: water for sugar, wildlife for roads.