Delhi: Gagandeep Singh stands at the edge of a trench cutting through a sugarcane field in rural India. He looks down at a dozen or so men toiling in the mud in plastic thongs and bellows: "Dig!" There's no time to stop, explains Singh, a district development officer, as the chop-chop-chop of small, crude shovels gouge the earth. It's the sound of history being made. The work gang is part of an ambitious project to recreate a mystical Hindu river about 200 kilometres north of Delhi. They're digging a canal in Haryana state that will, the thinking goes, eventually run hundreds of kilometres through three parched states to the Arabian Sea. The nascent waterway has...
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