Indian Defence Review

igure 4: Province-wise Irrigated Area

While framing the IWT, the irrigable area of India and Pakistan was assessed at 26 million acres and 39 million acres respectively, while the waters available to them are 32.8 MAF and 135.6 MAF respectively. This means that only about 1.26 feet of water is available to India for its agriculture on eastern rivers, while about 3.5 feet of water is available to Pakistan for its agriculture. Within Pakistan itself, there is a debate about the need for the government to improve its management of water.

Table 5: Province-wise Allocation of Water in the 1961 Accord

The Province-wise irrigated area is given diagrammatically at Figure 4.

Pakistan has a large surplus of unused water. Its documents show about 30 MAF as “available surplus” with a very high ‘escapage’ to the sea. Pakistan’s irrigation efficiency is also understood to be low, at an estimated 40 percent. Virtually all of the municipal and industrial wastewater is returned to the rivers, nullahs and streams untreated, which results in deterioration of water quality. Canal capacities are also not sufficient to provide the share of each province according to their allocation. The inflow of water for irrigation has declined from 140 MAF in the 1980s to an average of 100 MAF in 2005. It is feared that it will decline further as the flows in the three rivers are reducing at the rate of 6.6 per cent per year. While Pakistan’s irrigation network is vast, it is managed in an extremely inefficient manner.

Pakistan’s water woes are compounded by silting at the Tarbela and Mangla dams, with an internal official assessment admitting that it has lost 32 percent of its storage capacity due to the problem.

The Indus River System carries about 43,500 hectare metres of silt every year. About 40 percent of the silt settles before reaching the Indus mouth. In particular, the Tarbela dam is losing storage capacity of 100,000 cusecs each year. At this rate it will be difficult to support cotton sowing and wheat maturity, even though the designed life span of this dam is until 2030.

The ground water resources are also fast depleting. As compared to 3.34 MAF in 1959, ground water pumping reached 55 MAF by 2009. As a result of over-pumping, about 70 percent of Pakistan’s half-a-million tube-wells produce hard or brackish water. If the network of canals and tube-wells continue to provide gradually reducing quantities of fresh water, Pakistan will face a serious crisis in its agricultural output. Already the country faces a shortfall in food-grain availability of about 4 million tonne per year and this will treble in a decade. Besides, production of cotton, which is the most important source of foreign exchange revenue, will be severely affected. Most important, the unity of the country will be undermined.

The impact of the declining supply of water is the worst on Sindh and Balochistan. Sindh, almost completely depends on canal irrigation, as groundwater sources have become unfit for use. Salinity and waterlogging has affected 88.8 percent of agricultural land. They bear the brunt of the large and inefficient irrigation network. The diversion of water upstream has resulted in the decline of water downstream. Sea intrusion has already destroyed 1.5 million acres of farmland in the two coastal districts of Badin and Thatta resulting in the demise of three commercial towns Ghorabhari, Shah Bandar and Ketti Bandar and displacement of 250,000 people. The cumulative economic loss is close to 2 percent of GDP.

Punjab and Sindh are at loggerheads over deciding a formula to distribute shortages in water flows. Sindh demands the implementation of the Water Accord of 1991, whereas Punjab insists on a formula worked out in 1994. The politicians launch a war of words every year at the end of winter regarding water. This altercation reaches its peak at the time of kharif sowing in May-June and then subsides with the onset of rains. This is because the water flows in the Chenab and Indus are relatively low during early kharif sowing (April-June), while that in the Jhelum is relatively high during the same period. With Punjab’s exclusive rights on the Mangla, it can draw sufficient waters. Sindh is left to the mercy of the rain gods.

Sindh is also opposing the construction of the Thal canal which is designed to provide an additional 1.9 MAF water to Punjab from the Tarbela reservoir. The project covers four districts of Punjab Bhakker, Layyah, Khushab and Jhang. (Interestingly, this is the area where there is a concentration of jihadis and the private landholdings of senior military officials. The Board of Revenue of Punjab revealed in June 2003 that 112 military officers including General Pervez Musharraf had been allotted land in Cholistan at nominal rates. The Thal canal is required to build small dams to irrigate Cholistan for their benefit). Ownership of land remains a proxy for water rights, especially in agricultural areas. This excludes landless farmers. Moreover, ‘rights’ to water are ill-defined in Pakistan.

In order to prevent conflict between Punjab and Sindh, and a possible secession of Sindh and Balochistan, Pakistan needs physical control over the Chenab catchment region in Jammu & Kashmir in India. It needs to build dams, to store, divert and regulate water flows. It also needs additional fertile land. Thus, Jammu & Kashmir is a source of Pakistan’s water and food security. It is a real estate dispute for strategic resources. To the outside world, it is projected that Pakistan is supporting a struggle for self-determination for the people of Kashmir. To the leaders of Pakistan, Syed Salahuddin, chairman of the United Jihad Council, often assures that the Kashmir youth are fighting a war to help Pakistan secure its lifeline.

Pakistan is on the brink of water disaster. Its availability has decreased to 1,200 cubic metres per person from 5,000 cubic metres in 1947 and is predicted to plunge further. Persistent drought has left the country with 30 percent less irrigation water than average for the spring crop. The Sindh government has accused their Punjabi counterparts of diverting more water than they are allocated. But officials in Punjab argue that the water deficits come from high system losses. Pakistan doesn’t have a national monitoring system for canal water flow, making verification of the claims more difficult.

Many of the disputes that seem to be driven by fears of water scarcity are actually a reflection of another kind of scarcity: electricity. Pakistan opposes the Indian Kishenganga hydel project on the Jhelum because it will interfere with its proposed Neelum-Jhelum power plant.

Conclusion

Pakistan faces a water crisis and any attempt to blame India is a non sequitur. Pakistani unease about Indian projects on the western rivers, despite the many stringent safeguards provided by the IWT, suggests that it requests a re-look at the provisions of the Treaty. A military view is that India will be able to use water as a weapon of war. The only way to stop the world from labelling Pakistan as a citadel of terrorism is for it to distance itself from jihadi organisations that are considered as an asset by its national security managers. These groups are actually a great diplomatic liability to the country by laying the bogey of blame for the water troubles at India’s doorstep.

India is using less than its irrigation entitlement in Jammu and Kashmir and has created no water storage on the three western rivers. All the Indian projects are run-of-the-river and, given the restrictive provisions of the IWT, there is hardly any scope either for the retention of waters to the detriment of the lower riparian or for flooding the lower riparian. In actual fact Pakistan is getting more water than its entitlement because of India’s inability to use the water it is entitled to.

Pakistan needs to rebuild and overhaul the administration of the world’s largest contiguous irrigation network. For decades, Islamabad has spent far too little on basic maintenance, drainage and distribution canals, new water storage and hydropower plants. The result is an agricultural crisis of wasted water, inefficient production and incipient crop shortfalls. There have been repeated riots over lack of water and electricity in Karachi, and across the country people suffer from contaminated drinking water, poor sanitation and pollution.

The future looks grim. Pakistan’s population is expected to rise to 220 million over the next decade, up from around 170 million today. Flows of the Indus are expected to decrease as global warming causes the Himalayan glaciers to retreat, while monsoons will get more intense. While glacial melting will eventually reduce river flow in the low season, an increase in temperature in some areas will cause heavy precipitation concentrated for a few days during July-September. This will increase the risk of flooding. In the next 20 years, the Himalayan sub-region will face the depletion of almost 275 billion cubic meters (BCM) of annual renewable water. Pakistan only has the capacity to hold a 30-day reserve storage of water as a buffer against drought. It appears that water — and not terrorism — tops the Pakistani agenda today. Perhaps India needs to take a strategic view and suggest that for Indian cooperation on water Pakistan needs to abandon the agenda of terrorism it has nurtured all these years as an instrument of policy against India, i.e. as Pakistan turns off the terrorism tap, India can offer to turn on the water. However, the problem is not that simple as it revolves around trust.

The Indus waters issue is being needlessly politicized with specious arguments. India, meanwhile, is straining to cope with its own severe electricity shortages and is building a series of hydropower dams on Indus tributaries in Jammu and Kashmir. While technically permissible under the treaty provided the overall volumes flowing downstream are not diminished, untimely dam-filling by India during planting season could destroy Pakistan’s harvest. Pakistan, downriver and militarily weaker than India, understandably regards the dams’ cumulative one-month storage capacity as a potentially lethal new water weapon in India’s arsenal.

Pakistan needs to start the Diamer-Bhasha dam, an agricultural and hydroelectric project on the Indus that’s been on the drawing board for decades. The project is likely to cost more than $12 billion but has languished for want of financing. It has also has run afoul of the developed world’s disfavour of giant dams. It can add desperately needed water storage and hydroelectricity as Pakistan is tapping just 12 percent of its hydropower potential.

The IWT has stood the test of time in resolving differences. The Commission has met over a 100 times since the treaty was signed half a century ago to exchange information and iron out irritants, which means that the mechanism has been working well. Pakistan needs to build storage capacities because climate change is impacting the quantum of water available. The globally growing number of crises and disasters, and the more and more intricate, complex and multi faceted nature of risks require an innovative, integrated and problem oriented approach to risk and disaster knowledge and management. Laying the blame for problems on outsiders leaves little or no incentive to fix them. Pakistan cannot keep looking for causes and solutions outside her borders. Since quantitative issues are controversial, a beginning can be made with data sharing on water quality monitoring. Cooperation and not conflict is the sane way forward. Cooperation on the water issue should be looked upon as a means to a peaceful co-existence. Joint water management offers the scope for people-to-people and/or expert-to-expert connections, thus creating a channel for peaceful dialogue irrespective of political and military developments.