UMERKOT, Jan 23: All governments of the world, including Pakistan’s, and international financial institutions have collaborated with one another to ruin ecology of rivers and deltaic regions by imprisoning them with dams in the name of development, says chairman of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum Syed Mohammad Ali Shah.

The IFIs funded mega projects for the improvement of the irrigation system and installation of hydro power projects on the banks of rivers and build large dams under the pretext of generating electricity, which played havoc with the lives of hundreds of millions of people and deltaic community depending upon natural resources, he said.

Mr Shah was delivering a lecture organised by PFF’s Umerkot chapter here on Wednesday.

He added that rich and fertile deltas were devastated and lush green mangroves and riverine forests were depleted forcing millions of people settled along rivers and coasts to migrate to other areas.

The lecture was part of the PFF’s year-long campaign for the “restoration and freedom of rivers” which the NGO launched under ‘keep rivers free’ movement on April 15, 2012 in Karachi.

It is scheduled to culminate on March 14, 2013 in Islamabad.

A representative of the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research, Dr Ali Arslan, said that of total 1,400 million cubic kilometres water on earth only 2.5 per cent or about 35 million cubic kilometres is freshwater.

The principal sources of water for human use are lakes, rivers, soil moisture and relatively shallow groundwater basins and its usable portion is only about 200,000 cubic kilometres of water – less than one per cent of all freshwater.

Global consumption of water had recently been doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population growth yet its supply was heavily skewed, he said.

He said that human beings were depleting, diverting, and polluting the planet’s freshwater resources so quickly and relentlessly that every species on earth, including their own, was in mortal danger.

He said that global deforestation, destruction of wetlands, dumping of pesticides and fertilisers into waterways and global warming were all taking a terrible toll on the earth’s fragile water systems while the number of large dams worldwide had increased from just over 5,000 in 1950 to 50,000 today.

At the same time, he said, overexploitation of the planet’s major river systems was threatening another finite source of water.

Many rivers, including the Indus had been so dammed, diverted or over-tapped that little or no freshwater reached its final destination, he said.

Ishaq Mangrio, an environmental journalist, said that mega water projects funded by IFIs, unsustainable water practices and injudicious policies of institutions responsible for water management had had a negative impact on the Indus delta and its population.

Water that once delivered silt to estuarine fishery nurseries, fed lakes and supported agriculture in the region had been greatly diminished or had perished completely. As the freshwater flows in the delta had decreased, channels, creeks and lakes had become inundated by seawater and groundwater aquifers had turned saline, he said. The consequences on local communities, he said, were devastating and the once thriving small scale coastal fisheries had all but collapsed with disappearance of mangroves. Mr Mangrio said that Pakistan’s water situation was extremely precarious. Water availability had plummeted from about 5,000 cubic metres per capita in the early 1950s to less than 1,500 cubic metres per capita today.

He said that Pakistan was feared to become a water scarce country (with annual water availability below 1,000 cubic metres per capita) by 2035, though some experts predicted this might happen as soon as 2020 if not earlier.

He said that 90 per cent of the country’s dwindling water resources were allocated to irrigation and other agricultural needs and less than 10 per cent was left for drinking and sanitation.

Unfortunately, he said, intensive irrigation regimes and poor drainage practices had caused waterlogging and soil salinity throughout the countryside.

As the country’s population had surged, large volumes of water from the Indus had been diverted upstream to Punjab to satisfy soaring demand for agriculture and consumption in cities.

As a result, downstream in Sindh, the once-mighty Indus had shrunk to a canal and in some areas shrivelled up to little more than a puddle, he said.

The river’s disappearance throughout much of the province had destroyed livelihoods, particularly those of fishermen.

Ramzan Mallah of PFF said the free rivers campaign would gather momentum from March 1, 2013 with a caravan which would gather at Al Manzar in Jamshoro on the rover bank. Thousands of fishermen would throw flowers into the Indus and observe a vigil during their overnight stay along the river bank, he said.

The following day, the caravan would set out for Islamabad and reach there after 13 days on March 14, 2013 on the occasion of the International Rivers Day, he said.