IRIN Special Report on the water crisis

The immediate water shortage crisis in Pakistan is severe, and experts maintain that the long-term forecast is even bleaker. Meteorologists, who blame the prolonged drought on the La Nina weather phenomenon, warn that the country has entered a dry cycle and can expect drought-like conditions to return every six years. Experts predict that with prevailing consumption rates and a population growth of 4 million people a year, one out of three people in Pakistan will face critical shortages of water, “threatening their very survival”. Already the current drought conditions have devastated livelihoods in semi-arid regions, and left four million people in Karachi with no option but to drink brackish water. Environmental experts suggest that Baluchistan’s underground aquifers are dropping at 3.5 metres annually, and will run out in 15 years. Massive internal displacement is expected. The drought has highlighted the lack of any definitive water policy by successive governments, and has exposed serious shortcomings in Pakistan’s water storage and antiquated irrigation systems. Outdated irrigation techniques have resulted in water logging and increased soil salinity, while the unequal distribution of water for agriculture has strained tensions at community and regional levels, particularly between the rival agrarian provinces of Sindh and Punjab. War Footing Faced with such dire predictions, there have been calls for Pakistan to go on a “war-footing” to deal with what is considered by many to be a man-made crisis rather than a natural phenomenon. A community development specialist with the World Bank, Qazi Azmat Isa, told IRIN that the water crisis was not being prioritised as it should. “Water is an issue that transcends all sectors. I would have expected more attention on an institutional, organisational and country level,” he said. Isa said that recent light rains in the capital, Islamabad, would only lead to greater complacency. “It will reinforce the approach that everything will work itself out eventually. But while the rain may improve conditions locally, it will not trickle downstream to the southern areas hardest hit by the drought,” he said. Ironically, experts argue that Pakistan, which was cited in a 1995 World Development Report as having among the highest water potential per person out of 130 countries, could and should dramatically improve its water situation to overcome the current crisis and prevent future ones. Former secretary at the Ministry of Water and Power, Muhammed Zafarullah Khan, in Islamabad, said that good management of the water system was the major challenge to Pakistan. “There has to be a total effort in improving available water resources, reducing wastage and ensuring the water is available when it is needed,” he said. Harvesting water According to government sources, Pakistan currently has 17 million acre-feet of storage capacity and an annual demand for over 100 million acre-feet of irrigation water. No major dams have been built in the last 27 years, with Pakistan lagging behind neighbouring countries such as Iran, India, Nepal and Turkey in this regard. The current secretary of the water and power ministry, Akram Sheikh, told IRIN that additional storage capacity was mandatory. “So far, we’ve only planned storage on an annual basis. We need to look at having carry-over storages like small dams, so that we can project over longer periods and look after the dry years. We need to move faster so that in future we can avoid such crises,” he said. New water storage capacity is also urgently needed to deal with the sharply increasing population. Khan said that the Tarbela dam had enabled Pakistan to virtually become self-sufficient in wheat. But, because it was silting up, new reservoirs were needed to ensure there was enough water to sustain domestic wheat crops. “Otherwise we will be stranded with a 200 million population, with wheat production dropping back to pre-Tarbela levels,” he warned. The head of the Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA), General Zulfiqar Ali Khan, said that the construction of six regional dams was the first phase of a project that he hoped would quadruple the existing water storage capacity by 2025, bringing another 22 million acres of land under cultivation. “Today we are in a position to feed the present population. We are contemplating several times the present capacity, so we should be able to support a population several times the present size,” he said. With the six dams to be built over the next two decades, Khan said that they would not resolve the immediate water crisis. In the interim, more could be done by local communities to help themselves. Local initiatives such as “check” dams and house roof collection systems could significantly improve water availability if introduced on a large scale, he said. Water Use According to Khan, the drought had exposed unsustainable practices throughout the country. In Baluchistan, the drought had demonstrated that communities had overgrazed marginal lands, and sown crops, such as rice and sugar cane, which required large amounts of water. The solution was to begin using crops better suited to arid regions, such as jojoba (Simmondsia californica), a shrub or small tree producing edible seeds containing a valuable oil used in cosmetics. “Jojoba seeds have been tried and proven here. They don’t need much moisture and could be grown in our arid areas of Baluchistan and Sindh to bind the soil and provide farmers with a cash crop,” he said. A recent agricultural department study concluded that sugar cane consumed a disproportionate amount of water and energy in return for a low sugar output. “In this case, water usage is totally uneconomic and the return cash crop is not commensurate with the input of water that is required to produce sugar. We could import sugar from Cuba at less than half our production costs,” he said. But Khan did not predict any rapid changes in the sugar industry, whose 76 mills represented a formidable and reactionary lobby with the government. Cotton and rice were also water-intensive crops, due to the wasteful practice of flooding fields in the hope of better yields. Khan said that, paradoxically, last year’s water shortage had actually led to a bumper wheat crop of 22 million metric tonnes. Agricultural experts maintain that the acute water shortage had allowed fertilisers to penetrate crop roots, rather than be washed away, leading to a higher yield. Sheikh, the government water and power secretary, believes the crisis has helped people to “wake up” and spurred them into exploring modern drip irrigation and pivot sprinkling systems, which reduce the water requirement by 60 percent. “Previously there has been a tendency to use excessive water. Large landowners, particularly, thought that the more water they used, the better the crop. I think now the realisation has come that excess water means less crop. In the Punjab the situation has improved significantly with water more evenly spread so that the yields are higher,” he said. Another challenge, Khan said, was overcoming people’s perception of water as disposable. “Water is very cheap, and it is not considered a rare commodity. People don’t take care of it. The scarcity of water as a rare and precious commodity should be recognised at all levels,” he said. Although he agreed that a minimum amount of water should not be overcharged, he maintained that large consumers should be made to realise that potable water was not a free commodity, he said. Isa, the community specialist at the World Bank, said the lack of a rational pricing mechanism for water had contributed to the depletion of the underground water table in Baluchistan, where individually operated tube wells were replacing traditional community irrigation methods. “There is a flat rate for tube wells, and no incentive to save water. I can be environmentally conscious, and use my tube well for one hour a day, but my neighbour can have his on 24 hours a day and pay the same rate,” he said. One solution was to introduce a better pricing mechanism, although doubt remained as to whether altering the price of water was something that the government or public would accept. “But it has to reach that point. If pricing is high enough, then it becomes viable to explore recycling, the proper use of sewerage water for irrigation purposes, for non-drinking purposes, all of which we don’t bother about in Pakistan,” said Khan. Managing irrigation water Improving the irrigation system was also important. Pakistan’s vast irrigation system - comprising three main reservoirs, 19 dams, 43 main canals and a conveyance length of 57,000 km - is ageing and highly inefficient. Sheikh said that with one of the oldest canal systems in the world, it was inevitable that it was inefficient. The Ministry of Water and Power estimated that 35 million acre-feet, “the equivalent of “six Tarbela reservoirs”, was -lost in ground seepage annually, he said. The government has embarked on a policy of corrective action and hopes that a four year-old National Drainage Project will address seepage, water-logging, and salinity, leading to an integrated irrigation and drainage system. In 1994, the World Bank concluded that privatisation of the national irrigation system was the way forward. Since then, attempts have been made to encourage farmers to manage watercourses themselves. While the federal and provincial authorities retain responsibility for the main arteries of the irrigation system, the “on-farm water management project”, part of the National Drainage Project (NDP) and supported by the World Bank, has tried to hand over water management to farmers’ organisations. Under this scheme, farmers are expected to collectively maintain and operate the watercourses and channels to ensure an equitable distribution, Khan said. However, British NGO ActionAid deems the NDP “a failure”. ActionAid surveys on the impact of the project confirmed that most farmers did not have the expertise, time or funds to manage watercourses properly. It also says the potential for monopolisation by wealthy farmers was high. These farmers are so poor they cannot even repair their own house, let alone find money for lining canals”, ActionAid coordinator Aftab Khan told IRIN. In addition, it emerged that cartels of wealthy farmers had been formed, many of whom were local irrigation department officials, further unbalancing the distribution of water, he said. Upstream-Downstream A main challenge was to overcome regional rivalries in water allocation. Isa said that “upstream-downstream tensions” manifested themselves on a local as well as a provincial level, with “those downstream always accusing those upstream of uncontrolled water use”. Similar tensions occur on a regional level. Sarwar Bari, the coordinator of the NGO PATTAN, which works in Sindh Province, told IRIN that the Punjab was using more water than had been allocated to it under a 1991 agreement. He said that the canals in the Punjab were full, whereas they had all dried up in Sindh. In an attempt to address this perceived imbalance, the government appointed a senior Sindh official to a key role at the Indus River System Authority [IRSA], the body tasked with overseeing national water use, said former water and power official Muhammad Zafrullah Khan. This was already easing the situation, leading to a recent agreement to release water earlier in the season to ensure that it reached Sindh’s irrigation network a month later, in time for crops, Khan said. Bari envisaged a far more proactive approach. He said there were a host of measures that the authorities should be acting on, such as launching a national campaign to save water. “People who have very little water are aware of the need. But the focus is needed in areas where people do not have water problems, like the upper Punjab. Educated people living in cities are wasting a lot of water,” he said. But Bari remains deeply concerned that not enough is being done to solve the water crisis. “The government has no clearcut water policy in place. When there is a crisis they try to manage it on an ad hoc basis. They don’t learn from it. When the crisis is over they relax. Pakistan needs a cultural shift, and this is not going to happen overnight. We need to change the attitude of the technocrats and bureaucrats,” he said.