Sinkholes make for good drama in post-apocalyptic movies. And humanity’s fascination with sudden rupture of ground that gobbles up people whole is not just limited to cinema, but can be traced back to religion. But unlike religion-inspired calamities, things that make for good cinema in Hollywood often have little to do with reality at home. At least so far.
Sinkholes are caused by cover subsidence, a geological phenomenon involving sudden or gradual downward settling of the ground’s surface. This is often captured in iconic images of a building or a road subsided into the ground. Is it not just one of nature’s many quirks? Sometimes, yes. But more recently, these are often caused by subsurface human activity such as mining, extraction of fossil fuels, and you guessed it, rampant abstraction of groundwater.
Pakistan has one of the highest rates of per capita groundwater exploitation in the world, with 52 billion cubic metre abstracted every year. According to Lead, an Islamabad-based policy think-tank, more than 85 percent of Pakistan’s total crop requirement is irrigated by exploitation of groundwater due to arid climate. As per Lead’s estimates, all this is for a total agricultural output of $2billion per annum.
But Pakistan is neither the first country to run out of water nor the only one with significant dependence on agriculture. Highly developed regions are facing similar predicaments too. State of California is universally known as drought country, no thanks to its dry climate and long intervals of no precipitation.
Yet, California is also the heart of agriculture in the US, with a farm economy of $21 billion that produces 11 percent of country’s output. Given the dry spells, California’s triumph in agriculture has come at a significant cost. More than 80 percent of the state is dependent on groundwater, which over the past century has been pumped in excess of “natural rate of replenishment, lowering groundwater tables due to overdraft, and causing severe land subsidence”.
The golden state’s solution? A Sustainable Groundwater Act that sets a 30-year long program to restore California’s groundwater levels such that abstraction equals recharge at natural rate. The three-pronged strategy hopes to improve resource management through devolution of power to 2,000 odd local water agencies in the state. The existence of myriad agencies is to ensure that each organization is responsible for one groundwater basin at a time, and is able to come up with localized solution for what is essentially a local problem.
With a hundred million dollars budget sparse over three decades, the bill hopes to encourage local oversight, while making state funding for infrastructure contingent upon local authorities’ submission of medium- and long-term plans. Local agencies are required to ensure that these plans must eventually pay for themselves by charging for groundwater use.
The most significant section of the bill, and possibly the one most relevant to the local context, involves an amendment to the state constitution. Both citizens and government in state of California are now required to ensure by constitution that “any use of groundwater be both reasonable, and beneficial”. The amendment hopes to ensure that consumption from “groundwater has to be sustainably managed for long-term reliability, economic, social, and environmental benefits for future use”.
When it comes to water, it appears that the state of Pakistan is currently going through a rude awakening. On one hand, it is proudly declared that water is a fundamental right; privately it is understood that this may never be possible. For fundamental rights don’t come at a price.
Water is a tricky substance not just in physical form, but also in its politics and will probably remain so in times to come. So far, the country has taken a top-down approach, regulating it as a subject of inter-provincial relations.
But every day, human tragedies caused by shortage of water are felt at community and neighbourhood levels. And places like California have lessons to offer in identifying localized solutions. The state may not need to cough up $100million to fix the problem because our economy is one-tenth of California’s to begin with.
Pakistanis may have had few experiences with sinkholes, but they are not the only kind of tragedies that make for good cinema. Of those, we have had more than our fair share. Let us not add groundwater to that list.
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