Cost of new water policy too high for implementation

Pakistan’s long-awaited water policy, due to be announced in June, could take years to implement due to its exorbitant cost, Ibrahim Sha, additional secretary of the Ministry of Water and Power, told IRIN on Tuesday. Sha put the cost as high as “US $4-5 billion”, and said it would take “another six months to put into shape”, and years to implement. He told IRIN that the government simply did not have sufficient funds to finance such an ambitious project. Hopes that the long-overdue policy would alleviate the ongoing water crisis in Pakistan, now look set to fade. Experts predict that in the future, one out of every three people in Pakistan will face critical shortages of water - “threatening their very survival”. Government statistics paint a grim picture of the rapid depletion of resources over the years. In 1951, water availability per person was 5,650 cubic metres, a figure which dropped to 1,400 cubic metres in 2000. In 1991, the first-ever discussions on creating a water policy took place under the government of former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Steps were taken to ensure that provinces had equal shares of water from the River Indus, the country’s main water supplier. A water agreement was signed in March 1991 by the chief ministers of the Sindh, Punjab, North-West Frontier and Baluchistan provinces. This was followed by plans to build a large-capacity dam - the Kalabagh - in the Punjab. However, the project was opposed by various political factions, and the plans were shelved. When Pakistan’s Chief Executive, General Pervez Musharraf, took control in October 1999, he proposed smaller dams in various provinces, though as yet no progress has been made in this respect. Sha said: “We are thinking of developing more water storage ideas to overcome the current water crisis, but for political reasons there has not yet been an announcement.” He added there were many feasibility studies still being carried out on the policy, which would further hinder its implementation. The Ministry of Water and Power had presented a revised policy to the cabinet in January, he said, with proposals for extra dams and reservoirs. However, “this was put off for one reason or another”. The ministry claims that it adopted drastic measures at the start of the current water crisis, including rationing of water, and there was now a sense that supplies were “sufficient”. Meanwhile in Rawalpindi, twin-city to the capital Islamabad, where the water situation is thought to be better than in many parts of Pakistan, Colonel Mohammad Munir Afzal, deputy managing director for the Water and Sanitation Agency (WASA) told IRIN: “We receive more than 100 calls a day from people asking for water.” WASA currently supplies Rawalpindi with 19 million gallons of water per day, which comes from the Rawal Dam in Islamabad. The usual supply before the water crisis was 21 million gallons. The normal storage capacity of the Rawal Dam is 37,000 acre feet, but it now contains only 17,000 acre feet of water, this estimated to last for only four months. When that supply was exhausted, Afzal said, they would have to resort to “dead storage” - a quantity of water at the bottom of the dam, but that, too, would only last 10 to 15 days. “Then all we can do is sit and pray that the monsoons will be good this year,” he added. The annual monsoon rains are due to start on 15 July, according to Pakistan’s meteorological office. In the meantime, WASA is being alert against water-wasters. “We have vigilante teams who are patrolling the streets, looking out for people who are using water for washing cars and lawns,” Afzal said. Those caught could face fines of up to US $170. The drought in Pakistan is set to continue for at least another six months, and is likely to return over the next few years, according to Qamar-uz-Zaman, director-general of the meteorological office in Islamabad. He said even the recent storms and melting snows would have little effect on the water levels in some of the country’s crucial dams. “Water levels will remain dangerously low for at least a year,” Zaman predicted.