Pakistan’s water scarcity problem has multiple dimensions - internal and external. Beset with continuously diminishing availability of water due to environmental and human factors, a surge has been witnessed is conflicts over water among the various provinces besides the ongoing tussle with India owing to its unilateral declaration of holding the Indus Water Treaty in abeyance. On the domestic front, the federal government, under pressure from political forces and civil society, has agreed to postpone work on building six new canals until after Sindh’s reservations have been dealt with. Beyond the eastern border, a lot maybe required to engage India and resolve the water issue, particularly after the recent developments.

River waters have had a defining role in the development of world civilisations. The major civilisations developed on the banks of rivers or along sea lanes where availability of water was assured. The earliest wars in human history, after the emergence of tribal structure, were fought over water and irrigated lands. Water has thus been the lifeline of earliest civilizations. For many countries today, river waters are the obvious lifeline. Philip Ball’s book The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China explores how water has shaped Chinese civilisation—culturally, politically, economically and technologically—from ancient past to the modern era.

Brokered in 1960 by the World Bank, the Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan represented a reasonable agreement between the two nations.

Pakistan is currently among the most water-stressed countries the world over. According to the United Nations 2023 Global Water Security estimates, Pakistan ranked fifth among the 23 most water insecure countries globally. The report describes the country’s low water resource availability, complex water governance challenges, asymmetrical and unequal access to safe drinking water and very limited storage capacity.

The Indus basin aquifer is the second most overstressed underground water resource. It provides 60 per cent of the country’s irrigation needs, 70 per cent of drinking needs and 100 per cent of industrial requirement. This shows that our water use is mostly dependent on this aquifer. In other words, our dependence is on Indus river system which accounts for 95 per cent of our total renewable water.

Pakistan’s per capita availability of water in 1950 was 5,000 cubic metres. This is projected to decrease to 860 cubic metres in 2025, marking a transition from water-stressed to a water-scarce country. This situation poses serious challenges and risks such as food insecurity, deteriorating public health and economic instability.

According to the Economic Survey of Pakistan, the overall decrease in average availability of water was 29.8 per cent in 2022-23 using 2015-16 as the baseline year. Pakistan’s current water storage is enough for 30 days’ requirement. Meanwhile India can store more than 200 days’ requirement. There is thus a huge difference in availability as well as storage capacity.

According to Economic Survey of Pakistan, the overall reduction in average availability of water was 29.8 per cent in 2022-23 using 2015-16 as the baseline year. Pakistan’s current water storage is enough only for 30 days’ use. Meanwhile India has a storage capacity for more than 200 days. This makes a huge difference in water availability and storage capacity. Even India does not compared favourably with countries like Egypt (storage for 700 days) and the United States (900 days).

Pakistan stores only about 10 per cent of the available water. The average for the developing world is around 40 per cent. The country thus lags behind in this dimension too. No wonder 70 per cent of the population has only limited access to safe drinking water. The groundwater level has been dropping in most urban as well as rural areas. Safe water availability has also been affected by contamination of streams and aquifer. People living in many villages are forced to use canal water for drinking or bring water from hand-pumps installed on the banks of canals.

Meanwhile, almost half of our agriculture related water allocation is wasted in transportation through canals due to poor infrastructure dating back in some cases to the colonial period. The problem has been compounded by rapid urbanisation taking place throughout Pakistan. The urbanisation causes vast swathes of land to be unavailable for groundwater recharge. The urbanisation is driven by the high rate of population growth (one of the highest in the world).

Peter Frankopan argues in The Earth Transformed: An Untold History that the ice fields in the Himalayan mountain range are projected to decline by a third if carbon emissions fall rapidly and by as much as two-thirds if they do not. These glaciers store water for around 240 million mountain people and 1.65 billion who live in the ten river basins downstream whose livelihood, diverse cultures, languages and traditional knowledge systems will be at risk. There is urgent and dire need for developing new water reservoirs, recharge wells and rain water storage harvesting systems.

As climate change hits home, water scarcity will spike and the spontaneous response of each major power will be to pull inwards and consolidate control over its own sphere of influence. Insularity and xenophobia are very human responses to danger and shortages. But if sates give in to these impulses, argues Ilhan Niaz in Downfall: Lessons for our Final Century, they will plunge the world into apocalyptic geopolitics. This seems to be already happening between India and Pakistan.

Dr Muhammad Abrar Zahoor heads the History Department at University of Sargodha. He has worked as a research fellow at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He can be reached at abrar.zahoor@hotmail.com His X handle: @AbrarZahoor1.

Dr Omar Riaz is an associate professor of geography in University of Sargodha. He can be reached at omarriazpk@gmail.com. His X handle: @DrOmarRiaz.