LAHORE, Dec 14: As the technical and parliamentary committees on water resources appointed by President Pervez Musharraf start working, farmers from the Punjab have demanded that provision of water be linked to production of agricultural crops rather than the provincial quota.

Most of the farmers Dawn talked to on Sunday were of the opinion that water belonged to farmers of the country rather than the provinces. Treating it like a federal divisible pool of resources will not help the ride out of the present food crisis, one of them insisted. The agriculture science has developed to the extent that water requirements of land could be calculated to the last drop. In order to have efficient use of an increasingly scarce commodity, both committees should recalculate allocations to farmers of the whole country rather than insisting on the provincial quota system and letting farmers of one federating unit suffer at the cost of others, he said.

“In the natural scheme of things, water belongs to soil,” said an official of the Farmers Associates Pakistan. The authors of the ‘91 Water Accord linked it to administrative and political convenience of the then ruling class. They allocated water on mythical grounds of provincial shares without any regard to the natural right of farmers. This was an unnatural way of dealing with a natural problem, he insisted. This argument is not aimed at depriving farmers of one province at the cost of others but only at making use of the available water more efficiently for national good, he said.

“Under this new perspective, the water shares could be re-calculated throughout the country according to weather and soil conditions,” he said. This would surely leave a huge quantity of water with the planners for developing new areas and enhancing productivity. The terms of reference (TORs) of the technical committee could be revised to include the new task. Even if the government is not ready to immediately change the water distribution system, it should undertake a study to see how much quantity could be saved by linking water to soil, he insisted.

An official of the Punjab Water Council claims that TORs of the technical committee are confusing and bound to create more problems than solutions if not corrected. According to him, the committee was formed to assist the parliamentary committee in technical matters concerning new reservoirs. The mandate of the latter was only to concentrate on the need for new storage facilities and try to develop a consensus where needed. But now both committees seem to be venturing in new and time-consuming areas like studying the water requirements downstream Kotri barrage, the filling pattern of Mangla dam and the distribution pattern under the ‘91 Water Accord. Some six commissions were set up in the pre-90s period to solve the problem in addition to countless meetings of politicians. It took the country almost four decades to reach the ‘91 Water Accord. What would these committees be able to do in just six months if such big issues were reopened, he wondered. Both of them should better concentrate on a single-point agenda — the need for new storage facilities.

But the gentlemen heading the technical and parliamentary committees are already committed to specific viewpoints on water issues if their past is something to go by, says a water activist working with an NGO in Lahore. GN Abbasi, chairman of the technical committee, wrote a report on water needs of the future under The Reformers Papers in 2000.