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For centuries India's Damodar River, meandering 340 miles through the northwestern hills to the sea, has been known as the "River of Sorrow." A plaything of the seasons, in summer's 120° heat the river dried to a trickle in a parched gulley. But in the monsoon, it became a raging torrent, scourging the Damodar Valley with malarial, crop-destroying floods. Last week the fickle Damodar could bear a new name: the River of Promise. Across its path stood three mighty dams, shunting water into irrigation ditches that will eventually reclaim 1,026,000 acres of wasteland, and four humming power plants generating 200,000 kw. of electric-power capacity. The valley's desert was turning green with crops; plumes of smoke from new plants rose in the air. With 80% of India's coal, 98% of its iron ore, and all of its copper ore, the Damodar Valley was beginning to boom.
Halfway around the world in Mexico, another of humanity's sorrows was turning to promise. Huddled into a corner of Nayarit state, the squalid hamlet of Tecuala had for years had contact with the outside world only through a dirt mule track. But in 1951 an all-weather road pushed into Tecuala, and the town got a small, 600-kw. generator. Within weeks, the power plant put new life into Tecuala. A modern street-lighting system was installed, a water-pumping system modernized; Tecuala's hospital got refrigerators, fluorescent lighting, a fluoroscope. In short order, the town added a night school, a movie house, a public library, a daily newspaper, a radio station. Today, Tecuala boasts a population of 13,000 v. 1,000 only five years ago, and industry is arriving—an ice plant, two shoe factories, two ice-cream plants, two carpentry shops, a small shipyard on a nearby island. Said Tecuala's proud mayor: "Literally, I have witnessed our emergence from the dark ages into an age of light."
Tata & Kariba. Both India's Damodar Valley and Mexico's Tecuala owe their new prosperity to that most capitalistic of all capitalist archetypes: the banker. He is Eugene Black, president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—generally known as the World Bank. It was the World Bank that lent Mexico $24 million to help bring power to Tecuala and other forgotten towns. To India it lent $38 million for its Damodar project, and from both nations President Black expects to get every nickel back—with interest.
Last week Banker Black opened the moneybags for a still bigger loan to India: $75 million (at 4½%) for a huge, new steel mill to be built by Kaiser Industries for Tata Iron & Steel Co. The plant will eventually increase India's steel output by 45% to 2,000,000 tons annually. This week another new loan—$200 million to Chile—was approved, in Banker Black's biggest deal to date. With the money, Chile will launch an eight-year agricultural development plan to buy farm equipment, build new roads and start modern agricultural schools, thus make full use of its 50 million acres of arable land, only 3,000,000 acres of which are currently in crops.