Pakistan water challenges including climate change, depleting resources discussed at seminar
Karachi
Pakistan’s water issues are constantly changing and the global climate change is a major challenge we will have to deal with soon, the Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda) chairman said on Friday.
“After 10 years, glaciers would have been melted and one source of water gone. In addition, there is unbridled population increase which is exerting excruciating pressure on this life-sustaining resource,” Zafar Mehmud told the audience at a seminar titled, “Water issues in Pakistan”, held under the joint auspices of the Mir Khalil-ur-Rahman Memorial Society and Wapda at a hotel.
He hastened to add that right now, Pakistan’s water resources were enough. “Pakistan isn’t water-deficient, but projecting a situation that could result if the commodity wasn’t use wisely.”
Every region, he said, had its peculiar problems. In Balochistan, he noted, underground water had so rapidly depleted that it would take at least 200 years to replenish the resource.
Then, he said, there was also the rapid population increase to contend with.
He said that troubles began with the India-Pakistan Indus Basin Treaty and with the bartering away of the three eastern rivers to India, we were deprived of river water.
One manifestation of that, he said, was that being deprived of water, the once-flourishing river Ravi had been turned into a dirty drain.
He said that one of the options once suggested was for India and Pakistan to take over joint control of the Indus Basin something like the Tennessee Valley Authority in the US. He said an expert in water management, David Lillenthal, was asked to study the matter and he thought that it may be easier for the Kashmir problem to be solved than joint control being enforced.
He regretted that there was no forum to debate over the issue. Politicians, he said, could solve issues amicably by virtue of being the people’s representatives. “There has been no progress on the 1990 water treaty,” he added.
He informed the audience that in 1985, experts said in case of the Kalabagh Dam, two tunnels would have to be dug, one of a length of 10.5 miles on the right side and the other of eight miles to the left. The tunnels, he said, would have had to pass through the tectonic zone, exposing it to earthquakes.
He said that one of the reasons for our crises was that we had not imposed a price on the use of water for agricultural purposes.
Dr Abdul Majeed Nizamani, the president if the Sindh Abadgar Board, said, “We are not allergic to the Kalabagh Dam. All we ask is that the rights of the lower riparian population should not go by default and due care be taken of the interests of the upper and lower riparian areas.” His regretted that the lower recipients had not been taken into confidence.
Engineer Iqtadar Hussain Siddiqui said through the Indus Water Treaty, we had lost three eastern rivers.
Narrating the inception of the concept of the Kalabagh Dam, he said that today it had become highly politicised.
In his fiery and hard-hitting speech, journalist Mazhar Abbas said the Kalabagh Dam issue had become politicised because of the air of distrust that pervaded each and every sphere of activity.
Referring to the shell of a structure just behind the venue of the seminar, the Hyatt Regency hotel building, which, he said, had been there for the last 40 years, was a bone of contention between the Pakistan Railways and the government for almost four decades and the matter had not been settled.
He said that it was the same in other cases and we just did not have the capability to settle issue through negotiations. “You cannot build the Kalabagh Dam without consensus,” he said. “This matter should have been taken to the Council of Common Interests.”
He said that it was the rulers who had always wanted to have their way without first building a consensus and taking the masses into consideration and cited the shifting of the national capital to Islamabad by Ayub Khan, without the masses getting wind of it.
The killer earthquake of 2005 would have awakened us all to the lack of wisdom in shifting the capital to an earthquake-prone zone, he said.
He said that if Zia wanted he could have just gone ahead with the construction of the dam but he did not because our leaders always just played politics on issues by creating them. He called the Kalabagh Dam a “closed transaction” and said that the government should consider other alternatives.
In his scepticism towards the Dam, journalist GN Mughal said that we must take public opinion on board and examine the given data in detail before embarking on projects like the Kalabagh Dam. He cited the fact that the once massive Indus Delta was now drying up, affecting agriculture and the livelihood of the residents.
He said that on account of the delta being almost depleted, brackish sea water was flowing inland and ruining the agriculture.
Abrar Qazi of the Awami Jamhoori Party said in Pakistan, we had 40 million acre-feet of canal-irrigated lands. As such, he added, storage beyond a certain level was impossible; water had to flow and water management was needed. “We can just store 105 million acre-feet.”
As for the Kalabagh Dam, he said it could not be built without consensus.
Nabi Bakhsh, the general secretary of the Sindh Chamber of Agriculture, said it was true that the global climate change was bringing in its wake lots of challenges. He said that we should be talking about how India is usurping our water resources.
The seminar was moderated by Wasif Nagi, the editor of health, environment and natural resources at Jang, Lahore.