Water scarcity

The World Bank has rated progress in achieving the objectives of a 73 million dollars Water Sector Capacity Building and Advisory Services project as 'moderately satisfactory', according to a section of the press. The World Bank website updated on 16 February, 2018, notes that the previous rating of progress towards achievement of project development goals was moderately satisfactory and remains so currently; however, the previous overall implementation progress was moderately unsatisfactory while its current rating is moderately satisfactory. This improved rating is explained by the statement that "since the appointment of a new Project Director in early January 2018 the implementation progress has improved considerably, especially on agreed key actions. A new full time team leader has been appointed along with other key staff, including a new procurement specialist. The agreed project management actions have been completed; the project procurement plan has been agreed and entered into STEP, and procurement processes clarified. Procurement of key provincial activities and the major priority Wapada activity are now progressing quickly". Past experience of progress in project implementation however indicates that meeting the criteria set by the donor agency is not always be followed with actual implementation and one would be well advised to wait till the World Bank provides the update on this by late March 2018.
Asia Foundation recently highlighted a warning by the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) notably that if the government does not take action, the country will run out of water by 2025 - a factor that would seriously compromise the achievability of Ahsan Iqbal, the Minister for Planning, Development and Reforms as well as the Interior Minister's Vision 2025. Pakistan today is defined as one of 36 most water-stressed countries in the world and the scale and depth of our water issues can be sourced to not only persistent failures by successive governments, including the incumbent, from focusing on dealing with this issue for decades, but also strained relations with India which, as the upper riparian country, has built dams that have compromised the flow of water into Pakistan.
What is significant is that the draft water policy prepared by, one would assume, experts in the Ministry of Water Resources has been rejected by Sartaj Aziz, the Deputy Chairman Planning Commission, on several notable grounds including: (i) absence of targets and investment plans; (ii) no consideration for floods which is almost an annual event in this country; (iii) the draft is silent on modern day management of water resources that require the highest level of skill and knowledge; (iv) the draft focuses on what needs to be done and not on how to do it and who will do it; (v) ignores rain-fed agriculture and spate irrigation which accounts for 65 percent of arid and semi-arid landmass in Pakistan; and (vi) no mention is made in the draft of how to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted by Pakistan with respect to the basic human right to access safe water and decent sanitation. These are extremely serious failings of the draft policy and one can only hope that appropriate action is taken against those who prepared the draft.
It is extremely disturbing that the warnings of the country moving towards a serious water crisis by international and domestic experts since more than two to three decades have fallen on deaf ears and government after government has not only ignored this sector but the most recent policy draft is a piece of shoddy work that indicates a failure of the incumbent government to focus on determining the ways and means to resolve this critical issue through appointing appropriate experts to draft the policy.