IT is becoming a familiar ritual now. When water flows in the Indus river system go down, the leadership of Sindh accuses the upper riparian, Punjab, of drawing water out of the Indus through the Chashma-Jhelum link canal, thereby depriving the lower riparian of its fair share under the water sharing accord, and imposing a drought on the province. The leadership from Punjab, joined by the senior officialdom of the water bureaucracy, responds by pointing to the failure to build Kalabagh dam, as well as the high levels of water loss in Sindh. Lack of storage, coupled with theft and corruption of the provincial irrigation department, they retort, are the root causes of Sindh’s problems, not withdrawals from the CJ link canal. There ends the debate. Meanwhile farmers continue to suffer, and disputes fester between tailenders and those located upstream, closer to the canal commands. And citizens of Karachi increasingly have to resort to expensive water tankers to fill up their tanks and get through the day. Nothing changes.

The latest example of this is provided by Khurshid Shah’s outburst in the National Assembly against the water shortages in Sindh, in which he tore into the federal government for opening the CJ link canal at a time when his province is parched for water. The fact of the matter is that climate change has affected river flows in complex ways, affecting snowfall in the mountains, creating heatwaves in the south, and massively disrupting sowing and harvesting seasons across the country, but especially in Sindh and southern Punjab. The answer is not necessarily more water, or to replay familiar arguments in water politics. The answer today lies in adaptation, improvement of water utilisation, pricing, and investment in water conservation technologies, to name a few examples. Mr Shah’s outburst would be easier to understand if he could point to any initiatives taken by the Sindh government to address the grievances of lower riparians in his own province, such as tailenders of the Nara canal, or water theft from Kotri barrage. If the Sindh government had done more to promote investment in drip irrigation technology, it would make it easier still. But none of this has happened. All that we hear are the old, tired tropes from the 1980s about water withdrawals upstream in the Indus. The net result is that farmers will continue to suffer, while the leadership continues to trade barbs.

Published in Dawn, May 25th, 2018