The Ganges Canal Opened on 8 April 1854 With a 15-Arch Aqueduct at Roorkee, Its Channels Still Water About 9,000 Square Kilometres, and the Engineering College Built for It Is Now IIT Roorkee

The Ganges Canal was commissioned on 8 April 1854, after twelve years of work, and its water still reaches farms across the Doab, the plain between the Ganga and the Yamuna. The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) in London says it was the largest and most expensive man-made waterway in the world when it opened. The Uttar Pradesh Irrigation Department, in a 2008 document prepared with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), gives the land the system can serve as 907,690 hectares, which is about 9,077 square kilometres. The works at Roorkee needed trained people, so a college was started there in 1847, and that college is now IIT Roorkee.

The designer was Proby Cautley of the Bengal Artillery. The most striking structure is the Solani aqueduct, which lifts the canal over a river valley on fifteen brick arches. Cautley described the whole job in a three-volume report printed in 1860, and most of the construction figures below come from it.

A famine, a survey and a stop order

The canal answered the famine of 1837 to 1838 in the North-Western Provinces. Live History India puts the deaths at about 800,000. The ICE page says over 80,000, a figure ten times smaller, so the toll is better treated as unsettled. Cautley wrote that the project was specifically approved on account of that famine, and that the government had given up about a million pounds sterling of revenue in the famine year. His argument was that grain was in store in 1837 and 1838. What people lacked was money to buy it, because farmers who could not water their fields could not farm them.

Cautley began his survey in December 1839, according to a 2025 paper by IIT Roorkee researchers. The East India Company’s Court of Directors took up the case in September 1841, and Live History India says it approved it that year, the Agra government ordered work to start on 25 February 1842, and the ground was broken near Kankhal on 16 April 1842. ICE gives 1842 as the start and 1854 as the finish.

Money came in fits. Cautley’s own chapter list records that Lord Ellenborough, who followed Lord Auckland as Governor-General, refused staff and ordered the works stopped. Live History India says Ellenborough later allowed Rs 2 lakh a year and that the grant reached Rs 20 lakh a year under Lord Hardinge. The Company paid for the canal. Indian engineers had long moved river water with stone weirs and large tanks, as at Kallanai on the Kaveri and the Veeranam tank. What the Ganges Canal added was scale: a new channel from the river, carried across torrents, for hundreds of kilometres.

In a report to the Military Board dated 13 April 1847, Major W. E. Baker set the order of work. The Solani aqueduct would go first, because little of the canal could carry water until it was finished.

A head at Haridwar that the town had already chosen

Cautley’s report says the site of the head works was in effect settled by the priests and the people of Haridwar. A branch of the Ganga carrying roughly a third of the river already ran past the town. Haridwar and Kankhal drew a small watercourse from it for the bathing ghats, for drinking and cooking water, for corn mills and for gardens. The canal drew on the same branch.

He also planned to use shingle from the excavation to fill the deep pools at the foot of the main ghat, which he spells Pyri, so that pilgrims would find shallow water along the whole river face. He wrote that the sanctity and exclusiveness of that ghat would not be touched.

Two further accounts add to this. ICE says local priests feared a dam would imprison the sacred water, so Cautley agreed to leave a gap through which water could flow unchecked, repaired bathing ghats along the river, and opened the dam with a ceremony to Ganesha, the Hindu god of beginnings. The 2025 IIT Roorkee paper repeats the gap and the assurance. Haridwar is where the canal still leaves the river, from the right bank, with the Bhimgoda barrage regulating the supply.

Fifteen arches over the Solani

Below Haridwar the canal reaches Roorkee, where the land falls into the valley of the Solani, a seasonal river. Cautley chose to carry the canal over it. By his description the aqueduct has fifteen arches of 50 feet span each and is 192 feet wide, divided down the middle so that each half could be built separately. The floor that carries the water is 24 feet above the riverbed. From one end of the works to the other the line is 15,687 feet, or just under 4.8 kilometres. The brick-arched stretch over the riverbed is under 1,000 feet, and the rest is an earth embankment. FIBIS, which cites the same report, gives 15,688 feet.

Cautley’s section on the foundations deals with a sandy bed soaked with springs, and his third volume carries Captain Goodwyn’s report on sinking the foundation blocks. His design put stone lions on pedestals at the terminal works, with larger ones on the wings facing the Solani. The 2025 paper finds lions beside the canal at Roorkee today. Appendix A of his third volume counts 10,992,778 cubic feet of masonry in the Solani works, including the end bridges, which is about 311,000 cubic metres and more than half of the 19,866,540 cubic feet in the first twenty-four miles of the canal.

Secondary accounts disagree with these dimensions. The 2025 paper gives the aqueduct as 980 feet long and puts its channel 25 metres above the riverbed, and ICE says it is 25 metres high and carries the canal for half a kilometre. Cautley’s 24 feet is the figure used here, because it comes from the engineer who built it.

Village kilns, firewood carts and a locomotive called Thomason

The bricks came from Indian kilns and a great deal of Indian labour. Appendix A records that brick-making began in the first division in January 1842, with contractors engaged for 54 lakh bricks in the first season and the kilns of the common puzawa pattern, the village type used across India. By the end the division had produced 211,524,530 bricks, of which 180,779,542 were fully burnt. The kilns burned wood, and in the 1851 to 1852 season up to 2,000 carts a day carried firewood to the brick fields.

Baker’s plan of 1847 had estimated the need before any of this was built. For the aqueduct alone it counted about 85 million bricks and a million cubic feet of lime. The brick-making would take five years, with 149 brick-moulders and 3,309 labourers on site each day. The building would take six years, with 204 bricklayers and 2,471 labourers a day. Those are planning figures, not a payroll.

The works also had a railway. FIBIS, summarising Cautley’s second volume and the annual reports, records that Baker asked for rails and wagons in August 1846 to move earth for the embankments. By 1849 to 1850 about 5.5 miles of single line were in use, with 102 trucks hauled by people or animals. A small locomotive named Thomason started work on 22 December 1851 at the Roorkee end. The engineer in charge wrote that he meant to teach Indians to drive it. A few months later a storm blew the furnace fire into the engine and burned out its casing and tubes. Cautley adds that labourers were plentiful, that horses kept the wagons busy, and that the engine’s repairs kept blocking the single line they shared. He wrote that three or four locomotives instead of one might have made the idea pay.

The workshop and the college

In his chapter list Cautley dates the preparation of the Roorkee workshops to 1843, in a converted serai, a traveller’s enclosure. They grew into the works that made sluice gates, bridge fittings and tools for the whole canal, with an iron foundry attached. Steam machinery and machine tools sent out by the Court of Directors arrived in 1851, and most of it was running by May 1852.

The college came from the same need. India Post’s brochure for the institute’s 175th anniversary, which reproduces the institute’s own account, says that in 1845 Lieutenant Baird Smith of the Bengal Engineers began training young Indians at Saharanpur for the grade of sub-assistant engineer. Twenty candidates were admitted in 1846, and the Roorkee College of Civil Engineering was established in 1847. The library of IIT Roorkee says it was set up mainly to train native engineers for the Ganges Canal, and was renamed Thomason College of Civil Engineering in 1854 in memory of James Thomason, the Lieutenant-Governor who backed the project and died six months before the canal opened.

Cautley’s report shows its graduates at work. Assistant overseers on the canal came from the Roorkee College, and he wrote frankly that their six to twelve months of reading was entirely theoretical and that they should spend two years building under an officer before going out alone. The canal library at Roorkee served the canal department and the college’s students.

ICE calls it the first engineering college in India, and the institute’s text in the India Post brochure says oldest. The college became the University of Roorkee on 25 November 1949, and on 21 September 2001 an ordinance, later an Act of Parliament, made it the seventh Indian Institute of Technology. Our piece on the IITs covers the wider network.

What the canal does now

The Irrigation Department’s 2008 document gives the canal’s current design head discharge as 10,500 cusecs, about 300 cubic metres a second. The original design was 6,750 cusecs, raised to 8,500 in 1938 and to 10,500 in 1951 to 1952. The maximum area irrigated was 425,141 hectares in the rabi (winter) season and 451,046 hectares in the kharif (monsoon) season. The document lists thirteen districts served, one in Uttarakhand and twelve in Uttar Pradesh, while ICE says ten. It adds that the canal water also supplies drinking water to Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad, Meerut and Greater Noida, and industry, including thermal and atomic power plants.

Power is a later addition. UJVN Limited runs two stations on the canal in Haridwar district. Mohammadpur has three 3.1 MW units, commissioned in 1952, and Pathri has three 6.8 MW units, commissioned in 1955 to 1956, which together make 29.7 MW of installed capacity. ICE gives about 33 MW for the hydroelectric plants along the whole network. UJVN notes that the Uttar Pradesh Irrigation Department sets the discharge, since irrigation comes first.

The 2008 workshop, which trained 40 engineers and managers, also graded the system. It scored the water service from the main canal to the branches reasonably well and service to individual farms lower, and it recommended better measurement and routine silt and weed clearing. The 2025 IIT Roorkee paper says a newer canal and aqueduct were built alongside the 1840s ones near Roorkee.

Where the sources differ

The canal’s length depends on what is counted. ICE gives a main canal of 437 kilometres and about 6,440 kilometres of distribution channels. The 2025 paper gives 438 and 6,438 kilometres, which it traces to Cautley’s 272 miles of main canal, and says the system is divided into the Upper Ganges Canal from Haridwar to Aligarh and the Lower Ganges Canal below it. The Irrigation Department’s 2008 table for the Upper Ganga Canal alone lists a main canal of 291.96 kilometres and 6,582.22 kilometres of channels in all.

The 2008 document says planning began in 1838 and construction in 1848, while ICE and the 2025 paper have excavation starting in 1842. It dates the start of irrigation to 1 May 1855, after trial running, a year after the commissioning on 8 April 1854 that Live History India and the same document both give.