New system to determine provinces’ water share

ISLAMABAD: In a welcoming development, Pakistan has attained an automated system to determine water shares among the provinces, water availability forecasting, systems losses and gains and, to this effect, the Indus River System Authority (IRSA) will switch over from a manual system to an automated one from the coming Rabi season. The automated system has been named as Water Apportionment Accord (WAA) Tool, which will help reduce bickering among the provincial governments on water disputes to a large extent through transparency built into the automated system, Spokesman of IRSA Muhammad Khalid Idrees Rana told The News.

“The software WAA Tool has been developed by the Australian government through Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). The relevant top functionaries of the Ministry of Water Resources (MoWR), IRSA, WAPDA, and Provincial Irrigation Departments (PIDs) also played a pivotal role in this regard.”

The software tool remained operational for the last three years parallel with the manual system of IRSA and it has been found 100 percent correct. Now IRSA has decided to switch over from the incoming Rabi season, which will start on October 1, 2022 to the WAA Tool – the automated system from its conventional method based on manual inputs for determining water shares of provinces, anticipation for water availability, loss and gains in the system and system operation both in Mangla and Tarbela dams.

The automated system has been developed to bring consistency, transparency and ensure equity in the distribution of surface supplies of the IBIS (Indus Basin Irrigation System) between the signatories of the WAA, capturing complex IBIS river and reservoir operations and automizing them into a user-friendly software tool and capacity building of stakeholder organizations.

According to a statement issued by IRSA, an important meeting was held the other day with Zahid Hussain Junejo, Chairman/ Member IRSA Sindh, in the chair to discuss the progress and uptake of the Water Accord Apportionment (WAA) Tool and its further proposed developments. The software Tool had been developed jointly by collaboration between the Ministry of Water Resources (MoWR), IRSA, WAPDA, Provincial Irrigation Departments (PIDs) and the Australian government through Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR).

The software Tool was developed over the past three years. The meeting was attended by all IRSA members and technical personnel, Adviser WAPDA and representatives of Provincial Irrigation Departments (PIDs). CSIRO was represented by Dr. Mobin ud Din Ahmad (Project Leader) and ACIAR was represented by Dr. Neil Lazarow (Research Program Manager for Water) and Dr. Munawar Kazmi (Pakistan Country Manager).

After this technical discussion, a ceremony was held at the Ministry of Water Resources (MoWR) to officially handover the WAA Tool report to Syed Muhammad Mehr Ali Shah, Joint Secretary (MOWR), IRSA, WAPDA and representatives of provincial irrigation department.

Representative CSIRO briefed IRSA on the development profile of the Tool and said that its objective was to bring consistency, transparency and ensure equity in distribution of the surface supplies of IBIS between the signatories of WAA, capturing complex IBIS river and reservoir operations and automizing them into a user-friendly software tool and capacity building of the stakeholder organisations.

He said that accurate and reliable pre-seasonal planning was of utmost importance due to the sensitivity of meeting with the provincial demands in time in the face of limited 10% storage capacity of the system, rapidly declining reliability of reservoir storage as a result of sedimentation, excessive inflow variability and its disturbed timing under climate change scenarios, compounded at the same time by increasing water demands.

All IRSA members lauded the joint collective exercise by the Pakistani and Australian sides.