EDITORIAL: The Indus River System Authority’s (IRSA’s) estimated 10 percent water shortage in early kharif and four percent in late kharif-2021 imply that there is more water this year than last year as well as the 10-year average, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is still more the shortage of water that the Authority meets to discuss than its availability. Members of the IRSA Advisory Committee (IAC) seemed to agree that the “likely projected shortages were manageable” but simply hoping that “cropping targets for early and late kharif would be achieved by utilising efficient and best water management and water application practices” might be going a little too far. For it is precisely the way the resource is managed and stored that makes water scarcity a bigger problem with each passing year. And still the same circus featuring provinces at each other’s throats, howling accusations of theft and deceit, and the IRSA blaming all of them for all sorts of unscrupulous behaviour is played out with little or no regard of ground realities that are changing very fast.
Already the time when Pakistan was a water-abundant country is long gone. Now we are formally categorised as water-scarce because its annual availability is less than 1,000 cubic meters per person. And if something is not done about it very urgently, we will become a country that is “absolute scarce of water” in just a few years. That puts the entire agriculture sector right in the eye of the storm, of course, which means that the biggest employing sector of the country as well as one with which the largest number of households are associated faces a catastrophe that everybody can see coming yet nobody is doing anything about it. Moreover, Pakistan’s main export industry is primarily agri-based – there’s no two ways about it. Surely, nobody wants agriculture to collapse, households to suffer and exports to slump simply because water scarcity was not addressed at the right time with the right kind of urgency. There’s enough pressure as it is on agri production, household incomes and reserves without this problem adding to it.
The main problem with agriculture is that there is still very little modernisation in it, which puts our farmers at a disadvantage right at the beginning. They still rely on flood irrigation with no sign yet of adopting modern and efficient methods for water and nutrient delivery to growing crops like drip irrigation. And even with the existing, outdated technology there is not nearly enough storage capacity to meet annual requirements. So not only is there a need to build more capacity, it is also very important to educate and encourage farmers to embrace new technology and better, more advanced ways of irrigating water. Time is, quite naturally, of the essence because whatever steps are taken now will take a while to deliver results. Meantime, the country’s population will continue to rise at its present alarming rate and climate will continue to change for the worse, both of which will put yet more pressure on existing water levels.
This is not one of those problems that can be put aside for another day or even pushed down the priority list during emergencies like the pandemic because running out of water will clearly cost the whole country and everybody in it very dearly. It is, in fact, one of those things that will require all political parties to forget their differences for a while and put their heads together to find solutions that can work within given timelines. If only they had done so sooner water scarcity would never have become the kind of existential problem that it is now. But if this issue is still not given the attention it deserves then soon it will be too late to handle it and everybody will suffer as a result. The government needs to plan ahead and take action right now.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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