Averting Sindh-Punjab water wars

President Pervez Musharraf on Monday ordered the formation of special committees to be charged with resolving provincial water problems and that of the controversial Kalabagh Dam - an issue which has formed the basis of much acrimony between the southern province of Sindh and the eastern Punjab Province. "Every drop of water that the River Indus carries through to Sindh passes through the point where the Kalabagh Dam is slated to be built. If this dam is eventually built, there won’t be any water left for Sindh," Qamar-uz-Zaman Shah, the president of the Sindh Chamber of Agriculture, told IRIN from the southern port city of Karachi. Pakistan, which was described in a World Bank 1995 World 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. But experts describe one of the oldest canal systems in the world as "ageing and inefficient" and, after an assessment by the Ministry of Water and Power, it was hoped that a national drainage project, initiated in 1997, would address seepage, waterlogging and salinity, leading to an integrated irrigation and drainage system. Also, regional rivalries in water allocation have manifested themselves most prominently in the Sindh-Punjab water dispute, with the southern province accusing the Punjab of using up more than its share of allocated water. "During his first tenure, then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif presented a plan in which he proposed taking two canals out to irrigate vast amounts of what are essentially desert lands in the Punjab," said Shah, who has been a vociferously outspoken opponent of the Kalabagh Dam. Referring to the meeting during which Musharraf ordered the setting up of the committees, Shah said: "The president assured us that there wouldn’t be any canals made. He is very keen to see this issue resolved, which is why he has ordered the formation of these two committees: one is a parliamentary committee and the other, technical." Shah added that a technocrat with years of expertise in handling water-related issues had been selected to head the technical committee. Water from the five major rivers flowing through the Punjab is stored in roughly 17 million acre-feet of storage space available and faces an annual demand for over 100 million acre-feet of irrigation water. Only one dam has been built in the last 27 years, with Pakistan lagging behind neighbouring countries such as Iran, India, Nepal and Turkey in this regard. "My opinion is it’s a bit late. The Kalabagh Dam’s blueprint has been ready since the early 1980s, I think, and, while there were certain problems which have necessitated some changes in the design since, I feel they should go ahead and build it," Dr Asad Sarwar Qureshi, the director of the International Irrigation Management Institute, told IRIN from Lahore, the capital of Punjab Province. "Everyone knows we’re running out of water, we need to build reservoirs which will last us for 30, 50 years. Just take Tarbela Dam [one of the largest earth-filled dams in the world] - if we hadn’t built it, we’d be like Ethiopia right now," he said. Gul Najam Jami, the head of policy and constituency development at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Pakistan, told IRIN from Karachi that there were other factors needing to be examined before building a dam was even contemplated. "We need to look at the environmental and sociological factors, and then the economical factors: we can’t just rely on cost-benefits for such-and-such; you need to look at other costs - social unrest, seepage from these dams, the people that will be uprooted," he stressed. Scientific arguments were needed more than anything else, Jami said. "We need to find out how much water every province needs. Previous reports have been too influenced by emotionalism," he added.