The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) was never meant to be a Pakistan-friendly treaty, and amounted to a little more than the legalization of the theft of water by India that legally belongs to Pakistan.
Talking to Business Recorder, renowned expert on Dams in Pakistan and former Chairman Water Panel of Pakistan Business Council Engineer Suleman Najeeb Khan said this state of affairs has further compounded by the inflow of untreated sewage from India that is polluting the country's underground water as well as causing the spread of water-borne diseases like hepatitis.
He warned that a combination of the traditional lack of knowledge, commitment, and seriousness on the part of the national water managers continued to undermine the national interest of Pakistan.
Engineer Suleiman has called for a proactive evidence-based national and international outreach campaign for raising the level of awareness of policy makers, general public, and global community about India's unrestrained misappropriation of Pakistan's waters. He has recommended that a Commission for Indus Basin Strategy Analysis, first proposed during the National Conference on Reservoirs in February 1998, need to be formed for functional R&D in the water sector together with a Pakistan Energy Planning and Execution entity.
Dr Muhammad Ashraf, another water expert and Chairman Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources, said Pakistan has the fourth largest groundwater resources in the world after India, US, and China but it is the best managed. He said over 90 percent drinking water and 100 percent water for industrial use comes from groundwater. This massive water resources system is suffering from major inefficiencies.
He said major water sector related issues are - growing water scarcity, recurrent floods, inadequate storage facilities, sedimentation in storage reservoirs of about 0.2 MAF per year, and unutilized potential of 18 MAF, water resources management consisting of low systematic efficiency of less than 40 percent, low productivity per unit if water, groundwater depletion and degradation, disposal of drainage effluent of 10 MAF, and waste water management; and water governance issues consisting of low water pricing, zero groundwater regulatory framework, and lack of crop zoning.
Dr Ashraf said the construction of small and medium dams is needed along with large dams. He said there was a further need to increase water use efficiency by at least 30 percent by producing more crops per drop through use of new technologies like drop and sprinkler irrigation on the one hand, and more realistic water pricing policy on the other.
He said there needed to be a comprehensive regulatory framework for sustainable water resources utilizations together with reduction in water wastage, theft and non-revenue water allocation through 100 percent metering for drinking water supplies, creation of crop ecological zones, and establishment of provincial authorities including province-level groundwater authorities. There is also a need, he opined, to think of ways to transfer water from wet to dry seasons.
Some other experts have stressed on the urgent need for the politicization of water issues in Pakistan, the setting up of up to date water monitoring systems, the plugging of water demand-supply gap, the formulation of water recharge strategies, dynamic and aggressive water diplomacy, formation of public private partnerships in different areas of water management, etc.
It may be noted that the current unsustainable patterns of national water use, if not revised radically, could make Pakistan water-scarce in future. The inefficient use of water across the board has, among other things, caused Pakistan to become a severely water-stressed country. The cost of poor water management is substantial, which according to the World Bank, is US$12 billion annually.