A latest World Bank report paints a very grim picture of water resources in Pakistan, suggests urgent construction of large and small dams, and offers $1 billion assistance. This is the nutshell of the detailed World Bank report titled 'Pakistan's Water Economy Running Dry'.
Finally, it suggests a word to the reader that the report should be read as a "near-final" report following consultations with the government and the stakeholders. Pakistan is already one of the most water-stressed countries in the world--a situation which is going to degrade into outright water scarcity due to high population growth, it says.
FACT NO 2: There is no additional water to be injected into the system. There is no feasible intervention which would enable Pakistan to mobilise appreciably more water that it now uses.
FACT NO 3: A high-risk water environment. Pakistan's dependence on a single river system means it has little of the robustness which most countries enjoy by virtue of having a multiplicity of river basins and diversity of water resources.
FACT NO 4: Large-scale degradation of the resource base. There is abundant evidence of wide scale degradation of the natural resource base on which the people of Pakistan depend. Salinity remains a major problem--15 million tons of salt which are accumulating in the Indus Basin every year, and the ingress of saline water into over-pumped freshwater aquifers remain major and only dimly-understood threats.
There is large scale uncontrolled pollution of surface and groundwater from the increasing and rapidly growing heavily degraded surface water around all cities and towns.
FACT NO 5: Groundwater is now being overexploited in many areas, and groundwater quality is deteriorating and yet tens of thousands of additional wells are being put into service every year. There are serious and growing problems with groundwater quality.
FACT NO 6: Flooding and drainage problems are going to get worse, especially in the lower Indus Basin.
FACT NO 7: Climate change. Climate change is already affecting these western glaciers in a dramatic fashion. For 50 years glacial retreat will increase river flows. This is likely to exacerbate already serious problems of flooding and draining.
FACT NO 8: An inadequate knowledge base. There has been very little investment in Pakistan in building resources.
FACT NO 9: Much of the water infrastructure is in poor repair. Due to a combination of age and 'Build/Neglect/Rebuild' philosophy of public works, much of the infrastructure is crumbling. There is no modern Asset Management Plan for any of the major infrastructure.
FACT NO 10: The quality of project implementation is poor. Today implementation of water sector projects in Pakistan is characterised by inefficiencies, completion delays and time and cost overruns.
FACT NO 11: The system is not financially sustainable. Users of canal water pay a very small part of the bill, which is basically paid by the taxpayer. For 'how much is paid', the answer is much less than the (cost) presently for payment of heavily overstaffed bureaucracies, whose productivity is low and whose appetite leaves insufficient funds for system maintenance and operation.
FACT NO 12: Pakistan has to invest, and invest soon, in costly and contentious new large dams. Relative to other arid countries, Pakistan has very little water storage capacity. Whereas the United States and Australia have over 5000 cubic metres of storage capacity per inhabitant, and China 2200 cubic metres, Pakistan has only 150 cubic metres of storage capacity per capita.
South Africa can store 500 days' water in its Orange River, and India between 120 and 220 days in its major peninsular rivers. By contrast, Pakistan can barely store 30 days' water in the Indus.
Each million acre-foot of storage capacity lost means one year less water that can be supplied with given level of reliability. There is an urgent need for storage just to replace capacity that has been lost to sedimentation. Pakistan's two large reservoirs are silting relatively rapidly.
FACT NO 13: Poor governance and low trust. Water managers in the Indus Basin must learn to move water in a predictable, timely manner. Pakistan has among the best water engineers in the world yet this task is not done satisfactorily, less in the light of day and more behind an opaque curtain in which, as always, monopoly + discretion - accountability = corruption. Result is inequitable distribution of water, poor technical performance and a pervasive environment of mistrust and conflict.
FACT NO 14: Water productivity is low. And yet crop yields, both per hectare and per cubic meter of water, are much lower than international benchmarks.
In confronting these awesome challenges, Pakistan has considerable strengths, too.
HOPEFUL FACT NO 1: A well-established tradition and system of water entitlement.
HOPEFUL FACT NO 2: Pakistan has largely avoided the trap of subsidising electricity for groundwater pumping. In many countries electricity for irrigation pumping is heavily subsidised. At present the political pressure for "free power" has been muted because the water table is shallow and most pumps are diesel powered. The Federal and Provincial governments should continue to strongly resist pressures to move towards free power.
HOPEFUL FACT NO 3: There is much scope for increasing water productivity. Pakistan can get much more product - crop, jobs and income - per drop of water.
HOPEFUL FACT NO 4: High returns to previous major water infrastructure. 86% of the 50,000 mw of Pakistan's economically viable hydropower potential has yet to be developed.
HOPEFUL FACT NO 5: Challenge 1 is to develop a world-class knowledge-based capacity for adaptive resource management and service delivery. Pakistan accordingly needs to build a strong natural, engineering and social scientific cadre capable of working with all users in defining the problem, developing solutions, monitoring, assessing and adjusting. This is a capacity, which requires a wide range of disciplines.
Pakistan needs to develop its indigenous capacity and make a major push to establish and nurture a new set of institutions that will provide the scientific, technical and policy support for the management of increasingly scarce water.
Challenge 2 is a financially feasible approach to maintaining and modernising existing infrastructure and building needed new water infrastructure.
There is no systematic Asset Management Plan at either the Federal or Provincial level which describes the condition of the assets, the requirements for replacement, rehabilitation and operations and maintenance and the associated costs, proposals for financing of these coasts. Development of such plans is a high priority.
Second is the urgent need for construction of major new storage on the Indus. A curiosity is that the most vehement opposition to new dams comes from Sindh, when in fact it is the downstream riparian who is typically the greatest beneficiary of the enhanced regulation, which comes with new storage. Equally important is a well-designed plan for paying for the costs of this storage, with the very large hydropower potential offering possibilities for raising substantial amounts of private financing.
Third, there are needs for large investments in meeting the needs of those who do not have water and sanitation services in cities, towns and villages.
Fourth, Pakistan has been accumulating an "environmental debt" by not investing in municipal and industrial wastewater. It is clear that this has to change, and that it is going to take large amounts of investments.
Fifth, and finally, Pakistan has to walk on two legs - investing simultaneously in infrastructure and in developing the institutions required for the sustainable management of increasingly scarce water.
The resource requirements for all of these priorities are very large. Government faces three essential tasks. First, to set priorities for the short and medium term. Second, to define the principles which will govern what proportions of the initial and recurrent costs are paid by taxpayers and by users. Third, the government has to ensure that the limited financial resources are used very efficiently.
Challenge 3 is to put in place a modern set of institutional framework, with the key task being the development and application of instruments, which will motivate sustainable, flexible and productive use of water.
It is clear that this era of "productive anarchy" is now coming to an end, since ground water is now being overtapped in many areas (including both the Indus Basin and Balochistan) and other systems are going to resume their previous high importance, and need to be managed much more accountably and effectively. Second, groundwater will have to be managed - for related reasons of quantity and quality - much more aggressively than has been the case in the past.
It is going to require a very different type of state machinery at both Federal and Provincial levels to meet these challenges.
SOME OF THE KEY ELEMENTS OF THE "NEW WATER STATE" WILL BE: -- Introducing accountability, efficiency, transparency and competition into the surface water supply business. This will mean unbundling the business into bulk transmission.
This will mean moving away from a monolithic service model below the distributors into the canal commands (where a variety of forms of public-private partnerships can provide an alternative to the irrigation department).
The bulk business (operation of dams and barrages) would probably remain in state hands, but with many major functions (such as operation of power plants) concessioned out to private operators.
-- In such a system the government would play a very different role: to corporatize the state owned operating units to be far more active in groundwater management. This would mean developing a new legal and regulatory framework for co-managing groundwater with user associations.
-- A centrepiece of these systems: improving the administration of a well-established system of water entitlements.
-- Challenge 4 is to trace a principled and pragmatic path for implementing this reform agenda over the coming decades.
How the World Bank might be a more effective development partner?
The Federal and Provincial governments and the World Bank all agree that water management is one of the central development challenges facing Pakistan. Findings of a major pool of a wide variety of South Asians concluded that infrastructure, education and governance of high national importance (require) major increase in Bank lending.
Lending for Pakistan would increase about eight times from the 2000-04 period and account for about $1 billion in the coming four years. World Bank support would be based on "principled pragmatism" recognising that reforms and investments must proceed in parallel. Bank assistance would support four pillars described below:
PILLAR 1: ASSET DEVELOPMENT AND MANAGEMENT:Pakistan has a large endowment (with an estimated replacement value of $300 billion) of water resources infrastructure, mostly owned and managed by the provinces, and much now quite old.
Bank funded projects will make major investments in rehabilitation of some critical assets (including barrages) and will help put in place Asset Management Plans which will set priorities for asset rehabilitation and maintenance, make explicit the requirements for public and user financing, and develop efficient institutional arrangements for rehabilitating and maintaining this infrastructure.
One major issue that is likely to emerge in the 2006-09 period is possible Bank engagement in developing and co-financing major new Indus Basin storage and hydro, if and when the Government makes such a decision.
In discussions with the Government it has been agreed that the Bank could be involved in normal technical, economic, social and environmental standards, and that these investments were an overall program which included institutional reforms and investments at federal, provincial canal command and farm levels to ensure better use of water.
PILLAR 2: WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT: The Bank expects to support development of capacity at the provincial and federal levels for improving water and associated natural resource management capacity.
For surface water supplies for groundwater, a major emphasis will need to be on developing a better understanding of salinity and formulation of salt management strategies. An important element of Bank support will be training of new generation of multi-disciplinary centres of excellence.
PILLAR 3: SERVICE DELIVERY The Bank expects provincial and city level efforts to improve the quality, efficiency and accountability with which water supply, sanitation and irrigation services are delivered.
PILLAR 4: ON-FARM PRODUCTIVITY: The Bank will continue to invest in the on-farm services (land levelling, watercourse lining, introduction of new technologies) which are essential for agricultural diversification, and for improving crop, will mount a major program for providing analytic and technical support.
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