THE government is in the process of framing a water management policy, which is expected to be finalised in three months.

Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal, while chairing a meeting of the Central Development Working Party, asked the provinces and the federal ministries to send their representatives to work with other stakeholders for a consensus agreement on the proposed policy.

The water sector should not be ignored in the way the power sector has been in the past and the coming generations “would not forgive us if we don’t take appropriate steps” immediately, he said.

A similar attempt was made during the Musharraf regime. But the draft of the water policy was oriented more towards assigning a greater role to the private sector in supplying water to urban and rural areas. It also proposed reducing public spending on domestic water schemes and recommended that there should be appropriate charges for water consumption, to be paid by consumers.

Water availability in the country, according to the FAO, doubled between 1968 and 1997, from 64 million acre feet (MAF) to 134MAF.

As a result, Pakistan made rapid progress in agricultural production from the 1960s to the 1980s. After the 1980s, however, serious supply-side constraints emerged in the water sector, leading to stagnant agricultural production and yields.

An IMF document, released in June, emphasises the demand-side measures that will promote conservation and control of excessive groundwater exploitation

Government policies in the past had been more of a response to emerging problems rather than an attempt to pre-empt them. Hence, any future agriculture strategy needs to recognise the importance of comprehensive water management.

The incumbent government’s move to prepare and implement a water management policy comes at a time when the demand for water is on a rapid rise and access to it is on a fast decline.

The country’s per capita annual water availability dropped from 5,600m3 in 1,947 to 1,017m3 today, and is poised to drop further under the current infrastructure and institutional conditions.

Pakistan is among the world’s 36 most water-stressed countries, with its agriculture, domestic and industry sectors scoring high on the water stress index of the World Resource Institute. The policymakers face the challenge of figuring out how water should be allocated across different sectors.

Even though Pakistan has the world’s most extensive irrigation system, this system is unfortunately marked by an inequitable distribution of water, particularly to the tail-enders. Water flows to the farmers at the head of the watercourse command is greater than to those at the end.

This anomaly has its historical roots. When the British initiated the construction of the Indus basin irrigation system, they ensured that farmers belonging to more ‘loyal’ tribes or castes were given preferential access to the head reaches of the canals and the watercourses.

The poor farmers were allotted lands in the tail reaches where they had less access to water.

As a result, they resorted to groundwater pumping through increased use of tube-wells. This water geography reinforces social stratification in irrigated rural canal colonies and also reflects in the allocation of water to the provinces.

An IMF document, released in June, recommends virtually a paradigm shift in reframing the water policy and management in a national context and emphasises demand-side measures that will promote conservation and control of excessive groundwater exploitation.

It says the thrust of policy reform should be on improving water-use efficiency in agriculture, which continues to dominate consumption while escaping taxation at the federal level and being lightly taxed at the provincial level.

To make the water policy a success, the government must develop an integrated approach to water resource management that gives priority to conservation and sustainable use through improved cost recovery, upgrading infrastructure and bringing agriculture under the tax regime.

Then, the tariff reform is unavoidable to ensure efficient water use in both the agriculture and urban sectors. Canal water is highly under-priced and the cost recovery is poor, resulting in highly inefficient usage of water. The prevalent irrigation water charges (abiana) only recover 24pc of the annual operating and maintenance costs, and collection is only 60pc of the total receivables.

The pricing structure for major crops is also uniform and does not reflect their different levels of water consumption. For instance, rice consumes 60pc more water than cotton. This has impeded the adoption of more efficient technology and high-value crops.

A major problem that cannot be wished away is the need for storages to conserve surplus water from rainfall and floods, which mostly goes waste.

Earlier this year, the Indus River System Authority suggested to the government to freeze the country’s entire public sector development programme for five years and divert the funds towards the construction of major water reservoirs on a war footing as a national priority.

Total dam storage in Pakistan represents only 30 days of average demand, compared to 1,000 days for Egypt and 220 days for India.

Published in Dawn, Business & Finance weekly, September 14th, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play