First national water policy to be presented for approval

Pakistan’s first ever national water policy is set to be presented to the cabinet for approval soon, the country’s water and power minister said on Tuesday. “This is the first time we’ll have a national water policy. This document will be the first document, as far as water policy is concerned,” Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, the federal water and power minister, told IRIN in the capital, Islamabad. “It envisages the whole water issue, the strategy for it, the conservation...all the institutional reforms...everything,” Sherpao pointed out. “I’m hoping that [it meets with widespread approval in the cabinet] for water, which is an issue, you need a policy so that it will give us the guidelines. It’s a landmark development,” he added. Once the policy was approved, an apex body, headed by the prime minister, would be formed, Sherpao maintained. “It will also have the four chief ministers [from Pakistan’s four provinces], and a couple of other ministers, so if there are ever any issues, they could be brought to that forum,” he explained. Water issues have dogged Pakistan of late with a simmering controversy over the utilisation of water resources becoming so publicly acrimonious last year that it led to President Pervez Musharraf making a landmark speech in mid-September in which he urged the building of a national consensus so that the country’s water requirements could be met for the next half-a-century. Foremost among such issues is the proposed construction of a dam on the river Indus that meanders a long course through the length of the country, which the southern province of Sindh fears would deprive its population of much needed water. Outraged politicians from Sindh and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) immediately announced the formation of a bloc against the controversial Kalabagh Dam. The NWFP views the projected increase in water levels in the province’s agricultural areas with trepidation, fearing residential areas would be inundated and the local infrastructure destroyed. However, regional rivalries in water allocation have manifested themselves most prominently in a Sindh-Punjab water dispute, with the southern province often accusing the Punjab of using up more than its share of allocated water. 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. “If you look at the water distribution in the country, and their structure, and the war going on between the provinces: that’s the real issue. How would we be able to fulfill the desires and demands of all the provinces?” Qasim Shah, a research associate at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), a leading think-tank, told IRIN in Islamabad. A national water policy wasn’t likely to help, if past examples and experiences were to be considered, until the main issue - of water availability - was resolved, Shah stressed. “I think the whole water policy won’t be able to resolve any kind of issue,” he added. 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.