Professor Daanish Mustafa
For ten days in April 2025, Pakistan almost came to a standstill. No freight was moving from its only port city, Karachi, towards the population centres in the north. The cause was the government’s announcement of a project to build six canals to irrigate the Cholistan Desert in the east of the country.
Protesters in the southern Sindh province, fearing diminished water supplies, demanded the immediate cancellation of the project and blocked all highways running northwards. The government soon relented, with prime minister Shehbaz Sharif announcing the project’s suspension in early May.
This was probably, at least in part, because the government was anticipating Indian military action. India blamed Pakistan for the Pahalgam terrorist attack, in which 26 people were killed in Indian-administered Kashmir the previous month. Internal squabbles had to be diffused in the face of external threats.
Geopolitics handed a temporary victory to the protesters. But the potential of water to cause conflict in Pakistan remains a live issue, from households using suction pumps to draw more than their share, to large inter-provincial disputes.
As someone who has researched water scarcity in Pakistan for 30 years, I argue that water conflict there is entirely avoidable. It is largely a function of the state’s obsession with supply-side mega projects and a lack of attention to questions of equitable access and quality.
At a time when the effects of climate change are becoming more severe, Pakistan can ill afford to continue its engineering-based approach to water if it is to ensure sufficient access for all.
According to the Pakistani government’s own figures, more than 95% of the available water in Pakistan is devoted to agriculture. It is used to cultivate water-guzzling crops, including rice and sugarcane. Pakistan is the fifth-largest producer and fourth-largest exporter of these crops.
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