How does a country with some of the world’s worst water inefficiencies and chronic food security challenges choose to respond? The Cholistan Project and the broader Green Pakistan initiative have become headline-grabbing policy moves, positioned as bold steps toward agricultural transformation and national food security. The project is often promoted as a combination of large-scale afforestation and state-sponsored corporate farming efforts, framed as a solution to Pakistan’s environmental and food security challenges but frequently lacking in public explanation or contextual clarity. At first glance, these efforts appear ambitious, innovative, and perhaps overdue in a country grappling with chronic water stress and mounting population pressures. But ambition, when unmoored from strategy and transparency, often conceals deeper institutional weaknesses.
At the heart of the Cholistan Project lies a simple proposition: if productivity and efficiency can be achieved on barren lands through corporate farming and modern technology, it could inspire transformative change across Pakistan’s fertile but inefficiently managed farmlands. On paper, this is an appealing narrative. Yet, it is precisely the kind of narrative that gains traction when policymakers are unwilling or unable to confront the more politically challenging work of reforming entrenched farming practices.
Three structural failures have long defined Pakistan’s approach to water management and agricultural policy, persisting for decades without serious correction: paralysis in policy design, inequitable distribution of benefits and costs, and an entrenched culture of opacity.
The rationalization for the Cholistan Project, while presented as forward-looking and innovative, is ultimately rooted in avoidance. Pakistan’s agriculture sector is among the most water-inefficient in the world, due to factors such as antiquated canal systems, unchecked groundwater extraction, poorly maintained irrigation infrastructure, lack of modern on-farm practices, and absence of any pricing mechanisms that could encourage conservation. Comparative analyses reveal that peer economies achieve similar agricultural outputs with just a fraction of the water usage. The correct response to this crisis would have been difficult but clear: reform the system from within. This means incentivizing millions of farmers to adopt water-efficient practices, dismantling patronage structures that reward inefficiency, overhauling bureaucracies that resist modernization, and maintaining consistent policies across election cycles.
Instead, policymakers have gravitated toward shortcuts — appropriating state-owned wastelands, initiating grand experiments in corporate farming, and showcasing technological demonstrations that avoid the politically sensitive task of engaging with entrenched agricultural lobbies. The result is not reform, but spectacle. And policymaking that substitutes spectacle for substance is destined to falter.
Supporters of the project argue that experimentation is necessary when reform is blocked by political inertia. But large-scale flagship failures often do more harm than inertia itself. They reinforce public cynicism and give powerful vested interests yet another argument against future reform attempts. The danger is not just financial loss; it is the loss of reform credibility.
A second, more insidious failure is the persistence of inequity. The reality of tail-end farmer struggles — stories of families in lower Sindh forced to abandon crops due to dry canals, or smallholders in southern Punjab dependent on unpredictable water releases — should make this inequity undeniable. Water policy in Pakistan is often portrayed as a tug-of-war between provinces, most notably between Punjab and Sindh. This framing, while politically expedient, is misleading. The real victim has always been the Indus River system — evidenced by alarmingly reduced environmental flows, with studies showing that only about 20 percent of historic flows now reach the delta, causing severe ecological degradation and seawater intrusion. While the Indus Water Treaty of 1960 provided Pakistan with decades of water security, it also locked the country into patterns of overuse and dependency. As climate pressures intensified and populations ballooned, adaptation became essential — yet remained absent.
Sindh - like Punjab - enjoyed considerable benefits during the Green Revolution. In fact, its crop yields outpaced those of Punjab for years, and rural prosperity slowed urban migration. But these gains came at heavy costs: saline intrusion into the delta, dwindling environmental flows, and worsening tail-end deprivation. In both provinces, smallholders and tail-end farmers bear the brunt of these costs, while large landholders at canal heads and political power centers remain insulated. The discourse of inter-provincial conflict has conveniently obscured glaring intra-provincial inequities, leaving the most vulnerable communities forgotten. Historically, provinces have used inter-provincial disputes as an excuse to avoid making tough decisions about inequitable water distribution within their own borders.
Calls to renegotiate water accords gain traction, typically advocated by Sindh-based political actors, environmental groups, and civil society organizations who view current allocations as unjust and environmentally unsustainable, while resisted by entrenched power structures in Punjab. Such calls overlook the structural constraints that make renegotiations risky and potentially destabilizing. Without institutional trust and credible enforcement mechanisms, attempts to recalibrate water-sharing arrangements are likely to fail. What remains essential is a data-driven, transparent reallocation framework — one that evolves with changing climatic and hydrological realities and is enforced through independent oversight.
The third structural failure is the preference for opacity over clarity. Grand projects, especially those with involving state-backed monopolies, are executed behind closed doors. Critical questions about water diversion plans, the identification of communities that will be affected, compensation mechanisms, and independent oversight remain unanswered. Past projects such as the Left Bank Outfall Drain (LBOD) and the greater Thal Canal have demonstrated how secrecy and lack of stakeholder consultation exacerbate damage rather than solve problems. In the absence of such transparency, public fears are not only natural but justified.
The Cholistan Project is no exception, following the same pattern of opacity seen in projects such as the Left Bank Outfall Drain and the greater Thal Canal, where lack of transparency and limited stakeholder engagement led to environmental degradation, legal disputes, and long-term reputational damage for policymakers. The logistical, financial, and ecological challenges of diverting water to a desert are enormous. Operational costs associated with forcing water to move against gravity, the engineering complexities of maintaining such systems, and the almost certain requirement for continuous subsidies all point toward a financially unsustainable venture. Failure is not a distant risk; it is the most probable outcome.
What happens after such failure? The damage will not be reduced to budgets and balance sheets. It will further erode public trust in reform initiatives. The next generation of policymakers will inherit a public that is more skeptical, more resistant, and more entrenched in outdated practices.
An alternative approach could have focused on small, independently audited pilot projects on marginal lands, incorporating private-sector investment and civil society oversight. Pakistan needs a policy framework built on three pillars: evidence-based sequencing of reforms, equity that addresses both inter- and intra-provincial injustices, and uncompromising transparency in decision-making. Future interventions should prioritize pilot testing over grand experiments, commit to disclosing trade-offs upfront, and build institutional capacity for adaptive governance that evolves with climate realities. Ultimately, any solution must focus on strengthening trust, delivering verifiable results, and resisting the temptation of shortcuts.
This is not policy ambition. It is institutional evasion, dressed as a vision — and the price will be paid in public trust lost, credibility eroded, and a reform window slammed shut for a generation. The question is: how many more failed spectacles can Pakistan afford before that door closes for good?
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