Absent rains add to country's water woes

Faced with an impending water shortage, which could adversely affect the season's crops, the country's premier water regulatory authority has reduced the share given to Pakistan's two most populous provinces and could reduce it further if the rains stay away, according to a government official. "Both our reservoirs have reached their dead levels so we don't have any water available in the reservoirs for our irrigation channels," Sohail Ali Khan, the spokesman for the Indus River System Authority (IRSA), told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. "Now what we are depending on is the run of the rivers. Whatever water is coming from the north in three of our rivers is being given for shares in the provinces," he added. IRSA, created in 1993 under an act of parliament after a formal accord was reached in 1991 between Pakistan's four provinces prescribing water allocation between them, regulates the Indus river system including storage reservoirs at the Tarbela and Mangla dams - the country's two main reservoirs. Water shares to the eastern province of Punjab and the southern province of Sindh - both of which have been the main protagonists in a bitter regional rivalry in which Sindh accuses Punjab of using more than its allocated share - were likely eventually to be cut by as much as 22 percent, Khan said. "It's not yet been cut by 22 percent, but will be in the next 10 days or so," he maintained. Always a crucial period every year, the situation this spring had become even more critical because of the lack of rain, Khan said. "This time it's become a little more crucial because last year we had rains in these days, and that changed the whole scenario. Now, the crops need last watering. For that, we don't have sufficient water. So it is now entirely up to the provinces how they manage this little availability of water that we have," he explained. But rains could alter the equation quite dramatically, Khan said. "The met. office forecast says we might have rains for two or three days. If we have rains, the situation will transform drastically because the inflow will increase. But, if we don't have rain, this will further aggravate the current situation," he stressed. "Until now, the provinces have been getting water equal to what they actually wanted. So crops all over Pakistan are basically almost at the stage of maturity. And, hopefully, there won't be much of an effect on these crops, even if this situation continues," he explained. Pakistan, which was described in a 1995 World Bank Development Report as having one of the highest water potentials per person out of 130 countries, has a vast irrigation system comprising three main reservoirs, 19 dams, and 43 canals with a conveyance length of 57,000 km. However, one of the oldest canal systems in the world is described as ageing and inefficient by experts. Water issues have dogged Pakistan over the past few years, foremost amongst which is the rapidly dwindling capacity of Pakistan's three major water reservoirs: Tarbela, Mangla and Chashma. Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, the minister for water and power, told IRIN last September that quick depreciation of the storage facilities due to silt was cause for "very serious concern" and that the loss was "about 25 percent". The Tarbela Dam, one of the largest earth-filled dams in the world, is located on the river Indus, about 80 km northwest of Islamabad, while the Mangla Dam was built on the river Jhelum, about 120 km from Islamabad. The Indus river is one of the largest sediment producing rivers globally. This is due to its proximity to glacial landscapes and the erosion caused by steep-sided slopes. It has been estimated that the Indus and its tributaries bring millions of cubic metres of sediment into the system annually. Agriculture is most seriously affected by the build-up of silt in the water reservoirs as it reduces the availability of water that can be used, Farhan Sami, a spokesman for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature-Pakistan (IUCN-P), told IRIN last September. "The impact of silt impacts heavily on irrigation. The reservoirs are used to irrigate during dry periods," he added. Sherpao said, also in September, authorities were concentrating on keeping the reservoirs at a level that didn't disturb the silt towards the dams [as it was carried by the rivers]. "In the past because of droughts, we had to release water which did disturb the silt. We are now ensuring the level does not go down," he said.