PMD fears water shortages in Islamabad, Rawalpindi

Islamabad: Besides fearing drought in several parts of the country due to a continued lack of rainfall, the Pakistan Meteorological Department has also alerted the residents of Islamabad and Rawalpindi to the possibility of further water shortages in the days ahead.

It suggested that effective water management interventions could keep the agricultural and others sectors from the adverse impacts of the crisis. The alert comes amid the fears about the country running out of water in few years.

Recently, the government-run Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources raised alarm by saying the country touched the ‘water stress line’ in 1990, crossed the ‘water scarcity line’ in 2005 and will see the ‘absolute water scarcity’ by 2025 if the authorities don’t take necessary interventions without delay.

Though some experts blame the crisis on population growth and urbanization and others on climate change, they all consider the early availability of more and more water storage facilities to be the answer to it though the country, the fifth most populous in the world, hasn’t built a dam since the 1960s.

Water shortages often cause protests in major cities, including Islamabad and Rawalpindi, with the authorities either acting indifferently to the people’s misery or falsely promising the early corrective measures.

Confirming the PCEWR’s fears about deepening water crisis, PMD National Drought Monitoring Centre director Ikramuddin reveals a lack of rainfall since the start of the current year. “January to May (2018) saw rainfall 44.9 per cent below normal in most parts of the country.

The rainfall was 62 per cent below normal during the winter months (January-March) and 9.9 per cent below normal in April-May period,” he said in an alert. The weatherman warned that the shortage of rains had caused drought-like conditions in most parts of the country.

“The moderate-to-severe drought is prevailing in arid areas of Punjab, lower parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, southern Punjab, southwest Balochistan and southeast Sindh, while dry conditions have been observed in southern parts of the country during the last five months,” he said.

Ikramuddin said the dry conditions had caused water stress in the country’s agricultural areas and thus, calling for the availability of more supplementary irrigation water for Kharif crops. “The water availability is low in most reservoirs. However, higher temperatures will improve water level in major dams,” he said.

Alerting the residents of Islamabad and Rawalpindi to the growing water shortages, the weatherman said water in small dams located near the federal capital were at a ‘critical level’, while the groundwater boring and wells had become dry up to the depth of 150 feet in most areas of the two cities.

He pushed all stakeholders to immediately put their heads together and figure out how the looming water crisis could be addressed effectively at the earliest. “There is a need for an immediate water resource management strategy to avoid negative impacts of deficit rainfall on water and agriculture sectors,” he said.