'India didn't block water even during war'
TNN Apr 6, 2010, 03.57am IST
Tags:
Pakistan|India
NEW DELHI: As Pakistan drums up officially-sponsored hysteria on the "water dispute" with India, the government believes Islamabad is giving political overtones to "technical" issues.
On Saturday, Sharat Sabharwal, Indian envoy to Pakistan, described Islamabad's attempts to paint a picture of India as a water thief as "preposterous and completely unwarranted".
Even though Pakistan submitted a "non-paper" to India during the foreign secretary talks in February, Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi was quoted as telling TV interviewers on Friday that it wasn't India stealing Pakistan's water but Pakistan was wasting its water.
"The total average canal supplies of Pakistan are 104 million acres/ft. And the water available at the farm gate is about 70 million acre/ft. Where does the 34 million acre/ft go? It's not being stolen in India. It's being wasted in Pakistan," Qureshi is reported to have said in an interview.
In fact, in an interview on March 16, Pakistan PM Yousuf Raza Gilani contradicted his own government's contention that India's "water theft" was adversely affecting its crops. "When I took over as prime minister, there was shortage of wheat, Now there is a surplus. There is so much surplus that we had to construct new storage for our strategic reserves," he said.
Sabharwal quoted Pakistan's own documents to say that it lets 38 million acre feet (MAF) of water flow into the sea, and that too, during the kharif crop season. Pakistan has, in its internal strategies, bemoaned the lack of its own storage capabilities and the lack of hydropower generation capabilities.
According to World Bank, Pakistan has only 150 cubic metres water storage capacity as against 5,000 cubic metres in US and Australia and 2,200 cubic metres in China. With the appalling lack of storage capacities in Pakistan, World Bank estimated that its water shortfall would increase by about 12% in the next decade. Sabharwal noted that this had nothing to do with India but was a more fundamental question of mismanagement of scarce resources by Pakistan.
"Water productivity in Pakistan remains low... crop yields are much lower than international benchmarks. India has nothing to do with these issues of water management that are internal to Pakistan. Only Pakistan can seek solutions to these matters," Sabharwal said.
"We have never hindered water flows to which Pakistan is entitled, not even during the wars of 1965 and 1971... those who allege that India is acquiring the capacity to withhold Pakistan's share of water completely ignore the fact that this would require storage and canal network on a large scale. Such a network simply does not exist," he added.
