The great water debate
By Irfan Husain
Saturday, 01 May, 2010
Flying over southern Pakistan in May and June, it feels your plane is crossing a large desert. A few weeks later, the monsoons transform this arid tract into lush farmland. In the spring, the Indus works its magic along the fabled valley, but for most of the year, much of Pakistan is dry and parched.
Water, after the air we breathe, is our most precious commodity. Life cannot be imagined without it, and vast areas of the planet are being stripped of greenery as the flow of rivers declines, and the rains fail. Drought has struck in different continents, and glaciers are melting at a rapid rate. In the subcontinent, we are balanced on a knife-edge as water resources are being depleted while the population soars unchecked.
Acutely aware of our precarious position, a lot of media attention is now focused on this issue. Much of this discussion, however, is ill-informed and emotional. The thrust of the narrative is that somehow, India is stealing our rightful share of the water that is due to us under the Indus Waters Treaty. This accusation is constantly bandied about despite the clear assertion from our officials charged with monitoring river flows into Pakistan that there has been no diversion of our water by India.
Nevertheless, this is a highly emotive issue, and needs to be dispassionately analysed. According to Tariq Hassan, an eminent lawyer: Water is the most strategic issue facing the subcontinent. If there is a war here in the future, it will be over water. He makes the point that the treaty itself is inimical to Pakistans interest, and should not have been signed by Ayub Khan. However, much (but dwindling) water has flowed down the Indus since the treaty was signed some 50 years ago.
Another take on the issue comes from John Briscoe, a South African expert who has spent three decades in South Asia, and has served as a senior advisor on water issues to the World Bank. In an article titled War or Peace on the Indus?, Briscoe places the matter in a political context:
Living in Delhi and working in both India and Pakistan, I was struck by a paradox. One country was a vigorous democracy, the other a military regime. But whereas important parts of the Pakistani press regularly reported Indias views on the water issue in an objective way, the Indian press never did the same. I never saw a report which gave Indian readers a factual description of the enormous vulnerability of Pakistan, of the way India had socked it to Pakistan when filling Baglihar
.
Equally depressing is my repeated experience most recently at a major international meeting of strategic security institutions in Delhi that even the most liberal and enlightened of Indian analysts
seem constitutionally incapable of seeing the great vulnerability and legitimate concern of Pakistan (which is obvious and objective to an outsider)
. This is a very uneven playing field. The regional hegemon is the upper riparian and has all the cards in its hands.
Briscoe makes the point that even though India was cleared of any technical violation of the treaty in building Baglihar dam by an international panel of experts its timing of the diversion of the river to fill the dam caused great hardship to farmers in Pakistan. He goes on to argue that as the upper riparian, India can and should do much more to reassure Pakistan that it has no intention of violating the letter or spirit of the treaty. Above all, Briscoe puts the onus on Indian opinion makers to do much more to explain the issues fairly to the Indian public.
What this debate overlooks is the rapid population growth in Pakistan since the treaty was signed in 1960. From some 50 million 50 years ago, the number of Pakistanis has more than tripled to around 175 million today. The result of this unchecked fecundity, as Ahmad Rafay Alam informs us in an article called Going down the drain in a national daily, is that water availability per capita per year has declined from 5,000 cubic feet in 1960 to 1,500 cubic feet today. This will naturally decline still further as our numbers increase, while rivers wont suddenly bring more water, and nor are we likely to be blessed with more rainfall.
Alam writes: Pakistans water resource, the Indus basin, consists of glacial melt, and a far, far second, rainwater. Over 90 per cent of our water resource is employed in irrigation. Less than five per cent is employed for domestic purposes
even less is employed in industrial processes
.
The fact is that just as Pakistan faces a future of dwindling water supplies, so does India. And if both countries are to solve their chronic power shortages, they will have to build dams. There is thus a need to develop deeper understanding about common problems and shared solutions. Given the deep distrust that separates the two countries, it is unlikely that any sane, rational solution will emerge any time soon. Meanwhile the situation will worsen with rising numbers and diminishing water availability. Tensions are bound to rise, and there might well be a media-fuelled clamour to somehow force India to release more water.
When hard times come, it is the sensible thing to tighten ones belt and prevent waste. Yet in Pakistan, according to Alam, some 40 per cent of irrigation water is either wasted or stolen. Recently, the Punjab government accused the Rangers of stealing water from a canal. Surely the government must move to reduce this leakage. Charging a higher price that reflects the scarcity value of water would help prevent waste. Agriculture is not unusual in many arid regions, so drip irrigation, for instance, is not rocket science.
Another fallacy that needs to be put to rest is that somehow, the water that flows down the Indus into the sea is wasted. The fact is that the co-mingling of the river and seawater has created a vast ecosystem that is essential for the survival of much marine life. This provides a livelihood to thousands of fishermen. Whenever the flow of the Indus has ceased, seawater has flooded the coast, devastating thousands of acres of farmland.
Farmers in Sindh do not trust Punjab, and regard the Indus as their river, as it was until partition. So we must develop greater understanding between the provinces of Pakistan before we can expect our neighbour to live up to its obligations as the upper riparian
