Fears of imminent water shortage

Water levels at the Tarbela dam, some 60 km west of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, are sinking fast, raising fears of a serious water shortage in the country this year, officials told IRIN on Monday. "We have not had the expected rain and snowfall," the deputy director of Pakistan's ministry of water and power, Rashid Ali, said. The dam, which supplies water mainly for irrigation in the Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan and North West Frontier provinces, is currently being depleted at the rate of about half a metre a day. "It could reach the dead level in a few days' time," Ali said. Some 25,000 cusecs (one cubic foot per second) of water were being released to the provinces from Tarbela every 10 days, compared to an inflow of just 12,200 cusecs, he explained. The water level at the dam stood at 1,374.25 feet as of 2 March, not far from the 1,369 dead-level mark. "Once we reach the dead level, then we will only release water equivalent to that of the inflow," Ali warned, saying that the Punjab and Sindh provinces would be prioritised, as their agricultural needs were greater. The problem of water shortages has been long running in Pakistan. In the port city of Karachi in the southern Sindh Province, some four million people were left without access to clean drinking water last year due to a three-year cycle of drought. Meanwhile, in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, water levels in underground aquifers were dropping at the rate of 3.5 metres annually, and would run out in 15 years, experts warned. Usage of water from the Mangla dam, situated some 100 km from Islamabad, however, represented an immediate solution, Ali said. But with an inflow of 12,000 cusecs and an outflow of more than 28,000 cusecs, the water level here was also under threat. With a 51 percent predicted water shortage this year - a 10 percent increase over last year - Ali said all that could be done now was to "hope and pray for good monsoon rains". "The Tarbela dam will be completely exhausted in a few days' time, and we will be totally dependent on the Kabul and Chenab rivers with no water in storage," the chief engineer for the Indus River System Authority (IRSA), Amanullah, told IRIN. The country's meteorological department had predicted that the rains will be close to normal this year, but this was too early to determine with any degree of certainty, Amanullah stressed. He warned that April and May would be crucial months, as there was greater demand from the agricultural sector during this period, but added that supplies for residential areas would not suffer. Pakistan has a population growth of four million people a year, and one out of three people will face critical shortages of water in years to come, according to experts. Environmentalists warn that without good water management, the country will continue to face increasing problems with water supplies.