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Nor is growth confined to Teheran, an unhandsome city.*At Azna, near unexploited iron-ore deposits, work is soon to start on that final modern symbol of sovereignty, a $165 million steel plant to be built by a 'combine including West Germany's Krupp. In the southern city of Shiraz, where a new hotel is going up, a natural-gas pipeline is burrowing into town to provide cheap fuel both for domestic use and the burgeoning textile industry. Most ambitious project of all is a land-reclamation scheme in southwest Khuzistan province, near the rich oilfields on the Persian Gulf, where a corporation bossed by former TV A Chief David Lilienthal is building a 620-ft. dam across the Ab-i-Diz River to furnish power and irrigation to 160 villages scattered over 375,000 acres. Lilienthal hopes to restore the arid province to the fertility it enjoyed in the days when, as he is fond of noting, "the horses on the friezes of Persepolis were fattened on Khuzistan grain."
The Shadow of Nuri Said. In making over his country, the Shah has not hesitated to spend his own private fortune as freely as public funds. In the past nine years, he has distributed 350,000 acres of crown land to the peasants who till it, using the low, interest-free payments for the plots to finance seed, fertilizer and machinery costs for the new owners. And this is only the beginning: the Shah's aides have stern orders to cut through red tape and give away within 18 months the rest of the 1,400,000 acres that old Reza Shah so lustily acquired only a generation ago. With the $6.000.000 annual income of his Pahlevi Foundation, the Shah supports projects ranging from 40 orphanages to the education of Iranian students abroad and winter fuel for needy farmers.
Too much of Iran's money has stuck on hands along the way. Too much more of it has gone into what technicians call infrastructure, the little noticed underpinnings such as roads and education (since 1953, school enrollment in Iran has been boosted from 427.000 to 1,381,000) on which a modern economy is raised. The Shah's admirers, though conceding that this makes economic sense, cannot quite shake off the ominous shadow of Iraq's late Strongman Nuri asSaid, who built the finest infrastructure in the Middle East and lost his head in a bloody revolution. Even the enthusiastic Lilienthal admits that irrigating Khuzistan may take "a generation." The question is whether the Shah can count on his miserable people forbearing that long.