Nehru's description of large multipurpose river projects as the temples of modern India crystallised the postwar faith in dams, power and planned townships as the spatial expression of nation-building. The Bhakra-Nangal complex on the Sutlej, inaugurated in stages through the 1950s and 1963, became its flagship, generating irrigation, power and purpose-built engineering townships such as Nangal. The model spawned dam towns and steel townships across the country. It also seeded later conflicts over displacement and the human cost of large dams.
It made the multipurpose dam and its company township the defining spatial symbols of Nehruvian developmental modernity.
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