FROM July to October of 1943 the countryside south of Burdwan in West Bengal was submerged, villages were swept away and rice fields devastated, rail traffic on the lines running northwest from Calcutta was seriously interrupted, the cities of Burdwan and Calcutta were threatened by ruinous floods. Five years later, amid great enthusiasm, an act creating the Damodar Valley Corporation was passed by the Parliament of India. Linking the floods of I943 and the legislation of 1948 are the story of a river and the growth of an idea. The river is old, with a long history of destruction and change; the idea is new. After the floods of 1943 had subsided, the Bengal government set up a Damodar Flood Enquiry Committee, which advised that nothing less than a complete catchment-basin scheme could prevent further destructive flooding by the Damodar in West Bengal. But the sources of the floodwaters lay in Bihar, in the forested hills and ravines of Palamau, where the river rises. Thus in January, 1945, representatives of the governments of India, Bengal, and Bihar met to confer on the possibility of a unified development project for the Damodar Basin-the first occasion on which provincial boundaries were overridden in the preparation of an Indian water-development scheme, and the first time that a natural region rather than an administrative unit was used as the basis of political and economic action. In 1946 the preliminary memorandum' of the newly created Central Technical Power Board was published, and after many interruptions the multipurpose Damodar Valley Project became, under the government of an independent India, a matter of practical policy. The project now includes, in addition to its primary function of flood control, the construction of seven great dams in the upper basin and canals that will irrigate nearly a million acres of riceland in the lower basin, the generation of hydroelectric power, the supply of industrial and domestic water, malaria control, extensive afforestation in the upper basin, and the provision of a