Architect and MIT Professor James Wescoat promotes institutional capacity building to manage a critical resource.

The historic gardens of the Mughal Empire in India and Pakistan first drew James Wescoat to the Indus Basin four decades ago. A landscape architect and professor in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture in the MIT Department of Architecture, Wescoat has returned to the region many times for research that spans studies of 17th-century waterworks and 21st-century water systems, policy analyses, and multilateral water agreements.

Irrigated plains of the Punjab province in Pakistan, viewed from a Mughal tower in Sheikhpura District
Irrigated plains of the Punjab province in Pakistan, viewed from a Mughal tower in Sheikhpura District © James Wescoat

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His partners in Pakistan include the new Centre for Water Informatics and Technology (WIT) of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). “WIT has devised innovative canal management and data transmission technologies that monitor water flows precisely and in real time,” says Wescoat, who chairs the WIT Advisory Group. “WIT’s pioneering systems can revolutionize water management.”

“Professor Wescoat has deep understanding of the historical and geographical importance of the Indus Basin,” says LUMS associate professor of electrical engineering Abubakr Muhammad, founding director of WIT. “His expertise has helped us to formulate our unique vision for WIT and to imagine an Indus Basin for the 21st century.”

WIT is based at the university’s Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering. Wescoat serves on the school’s advisory board, whose first chair was Robert L. Jaffe, the Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics at MIT.

Lahore is famous for its Mughal gardens, including the 17th-century Shalimar Gardens complex, an engineered paradise-like garden that harnesses a combination of long-distance canal irrigation and natural forces such as gravity and monsoon rains to sustain its water cascades and fountains. The wisdom and ingenuity of Mughal Empire architects and engineers, who designed gardens in harmony with nature, inspires the holistic vision of WIT.               

“WIT aspires to help create such a Garden of Eden across the entire Indus Basin,” says Muhammad. “Imagine how a gardener meticulously takes care of plants. Such attention to detail on a vast, basin-wide scale is possible with water informatics and related water technologies.”

Also on WIT’s Advisory Board is Afreen Siddiqi, a research scientist in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. “Dr. Siddiqi and I are collaborating on water, energy, and food research in South Asia,” says Wescoat, “and we envision WIT as a major research partner.”