 |
| |
WEEKLY
SECTIONS |
 |
Opinion Archive
The News International Pakistan
|
| |
 |
| 'Running on empty' |
|
|
|
Urban/urbane
By Ahmad Rafay Alam
If there is one terrifying prospect of the future it is the shortage of water. This point was driven home in book review of Pakistan's water crisis. Late last year, the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC hosted "Running on empty: Pakistan's water crisis," a day-long conference about our dwindling water resources. The papers delivered at the conference have been compiled and published under the same name as the conference.
At the time of Partition, Pakistan's water resources worked out to about 5,000 cubic meters of water per capita. Now, it is less than 1,500 cubic meters per capita, and this figure is expected to drop, as early as 2020, to less than 1,000 cubic meters per capita, making Pakistan a "water-scarce" nation.
Our water resources predominantly originate from Himalayan glacial melt that drains through the Indus Basin. So far, the Strategy of harnessing our water resources has focused on water storage – that is, the construction of dams and reservoirs – rather than water conservation.
Dams are environment issues of great complexity. They are expensive to build, involve destruction of habitat and heritage and relocation of whole communities. They also need water, and the one thing the Strategy does not touch upon is where the water to fill the dams and reservoirs will come from.
Because of climate change, the Himalayan glaciers are melting at an alarming rate. For our water resources, this means an increase in water, in the form of flooding. Within the next 50 years, however, experts believe there will be a 30 to 40 percent drop in glacial melt because, well, the glaciers will have dwindled and receded. While our strategy to create more storage capacity for water may appear to be the only option available to us, one has to remember that glacial melt isn't all water. It's also full of silt that will effectively reduce the capacity of the reservoirs we intend to build.
Meanwhile, no one's really talking about the other option available:
conservation. Most of Pakistan's water, nearly 90 percent, is consumed in irrigation and other agricultural needs. One expects a high figure in a predominantly agricultural economy. But water losses, caused by an inefficient canal system and theft and water-logging and salinity caused by poor farming practices, means that nearly 40 percent of the water used in irrigation is wasted and vast tracts of farmland has been rendered infertile. Sensible water management practices abound, and some of the most efficient, like spate irrigation, are based on local practice. It's time for the strategy to harness our water resources to change from being large-scale capital- and technology-intensive and environmentally degrading to management-intensive and ecologically balanced and relying on indigenous technology. Of course, there is deafening silence from the government and the public sector when it comes to large-scale water conservation policies. It's as if the only options are binary: either water storage and nothing else, or water conservation and nothing else, and that they cannot be exercised simultaneously.
The shortage of water has deep political, economic and social effects.
For example, farmers in Sindh point their fingers at Punjabi landlords and accuse them of "stealing their share" of the Indus's water. In some parts of Sindh, according to Michael Kugelman, the editor of "Running on Empty," the "mighty" Indus is little more than a canal; in others, it's no more than a puddle. Interestingly, the 1991 Water Accord--in which the provinces, in a rare show of political equanimity, agreed to the apportionment of water--is based on the actual system uses for the 1977-1982 period. One wonders whether the apportionment remains fair if those underlying actual system use figures are, because of diminishing water resources, no longer the case.
Water shortage also affects the availability of drinking water and water for sanitation. As it is, less than 10 percent of our water resources as left for our 160 or so million awam. Our urban areas, which are where the majority of the population will live and work in the next fifteen years, will face drinking water shortages. As it is, most of Karachi has water available, on average, for four hours a day. Some experts suggest that Quetta may not have any water supplies within the next decade. Islamabad, the Federal Capital, which has no water conservation practices in place, is facing a water crisis of its own, and the Capital Development Authority has had to resort to environmentally questionable methods of diverting rivers and canals to provide residents. But, as yet, not a word has been uttered about water conservation practices.
Dwindling water resources also destroy rural and agricultural economies. Under the 1991 Water Accord, Sindh asked for a minimum of ten million acre feet of water below Kotri. The request was never formally agreed to and, today, only about two million acre feet flows through. As a result, the Indian Ocean, no longer kept at bay by the flow of the Indus, is creeping inland and destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland. Because of diminished water flow below Kotri Barrage and seawater intrusion, tens of thousands of Sindhi farming families have had no choice but to relocate. Their land rendered useless, they are forced to look for work and sustenance elsewhere. More often than not, they are rendered into appalling poverty. This is happening, with alarming frequency, not just in Sindh, but in rural Punjab and elsewhere in Pakistan. In fact, our Initial Communication on Climate Change, issued in 2003, predicted large-scale relocations and rural to urban migrations as a result of the changes in water availability brought about by changes in the environment.
One isn't suggesting giving up water storage strategies. But there needs to be awareness that water storage and water conservation are not mutually exclusive. The benefits of rolling out both the strategies would be huge. If government threw its weight behind conservation, the opportunities water conservation presents would result in massive investment in new practices. This would be the creation of new jobs and the foundations of a new, sustainable agricultural economy.
The water shortage is serious business. We must all prepare for a future where our grandchildren will not know of a shower; only the rationed use of a wet towel.
What is true of water is, incidentally, also true for electricity. The federal government has announced its approval of 14 new rental power plants that will provide the much-needed 1500MW of energy. But no one asks of the full 25 percent of electricity lost due to an inefficient transmission and distribution system. No one seems to care that Pakistan's single-largest source of energy – enough to see us through the next five years – is in conservation, not in adding more capacity to the grid. It is considerably cheaper to save 1MW of electricity through conservation than it is to pay for a rental power producer to generate the same.
The writer is an advocate of the high court and a member of the adjunct faculty at LUMS. He has an interest in urban planning. Email: ralam@nexlinx.net.pk
|
| |
|
| Back
| Send
this story to Friend | Print
Version |
|
|
|
 |
ISSN 1563-9479