SINDH has a rich riverine area that sprawls across nearly two million acres, according to government data.

Riverine area, or katcha in local parlance, is famous for its soil fertility thanks to silt deposits the Indus river brings each year despite losing its historic flows.

It is this soil fertility that powerful families like Pirs, Jatois, Bhuttos and Syeds take full advantage of by cultivating hundreds and thousands of acres of land lying between the two embankments of the Indus River.

Crops like banana and sugarcane are cultivated there besides cotton crop in summer and wheat in the winter season.

Land inside the katcha area belongs to the Sindh revenue, irrigation and forest departments.

The Sindh Board of Revenue Secretary, Munawar Mahesar, discloses that the revenue department on its part levies Rs5 per acre, as local cess; Rs200 per acre on all crops (excluding orchards) and Rs500 per acre per annum on orchards’ cultivation towards land tax.

Landholding worth 32 acres, however, is exempted from these taxes. The department charges Rs10 per acre per year on land it leases inside the katcha area, he adds.

However, Sindh Abadgar Board (SAB) President Abdul Majeed Nizamani believes that the katcha area stands at 2.6 million acres, of which 500,000 acres is the path where Indus river’s main current flows. “The rest of katcha land [i.e. 2.1m acres] remains under occupation of different people legally or illegally for agriculture and other purposes,” he says.

It is soil fertility that powerful families take full advantage of by cultivating hundreds and thousands of acres of land lying between the two embankments of the Indus river

Wheat cultivation in Rabi season has been a norm in riverine area as the katcha dwellers (mostly peasants) sow the crop on residual soil moistures on small acreages after annual floods. These flows, however, have somewhat faded away due to a change in the weather. But due to large landholdings (known as ketis), cultivation by these peasants hardly matter now.

Over the years Sindh has lost its forest cover substantially. A senior official of the provincial forest department says that of the 575,000 acres of forest land, around 100,000 acres would actually be under forest cover. The remaining land is used for cropping or is under illegal occupation of influential people. “Past approaches [by the government] to get encroached areas vacated have either not produced results or worked only temporarily,” he says.

Figures for crop cultivation in katcha area are not compiled by the government as it intends to look the other way. The forest department leased out the land for five years under a policy introduced in 2004-05.

An acre of forest land is leased out for as low as Rs1,600 to Rs2,000 annually. Comparatively, land for banana orchard given under agreement by private parties in settled and command areas of canals is leased for Rs80,000 to Rs100,000 per acre annually. Nearly 70,000 acres of forest land is leased, says the forest department official.

Policy requires that 80 per cent of the leased forest land should be used for agriculture while forests are to be raised on the remaining area. But the provision is hardly implemented.

The Sindh’s agriculture department updates figures for major crops — such as cotton, wheat, sugarcane and rice — that are grown in settled or surveyed area. For instance, Kharif sowing area proposed by the agriculture department for 2017 is 3.5m acres. Crop cultivation in riverine area would certainly be in addition to it. However, it is difficult to determine how much acreage is brought under cultivation of crops annually in riverine area.

The contribution of crop cultivated in riverine area to the overall production is substantial. An official of the provincial agriculture department says while it doesn’t collect figures for katcha acreage, its production is part of official figures as the crops are sold at the market.

“Gone are days when inhabitants of katcha used to cultivate land to make ends meet. Presently, the land there belongs to who’s who of the province,” says Mahmood Nawaz Shah, the vice-president of SAB.

He says that per-acre productivity assessed by the agriculture department on the basis of acreage in settled area alone becomes questionable in the absence of statistics of crops production in riverine area. This is bound to impact future planning.

Settlements, encroachment like private bunds and land cultivation in riverine area also obstruct the passage of river water flows. It was also indicated in the inquiry report of a Supreme Court-appointed judicial commission following the infamous Aug 7 dyke breach in 2010 super floods that wreaked havoc mostly in districts located on the right bank of the Indus River.

Inundation of riverine area in floods is essential for its ecology. However, the ecology is jeopardised as riverbed has been narrowed due to illegal structures, settlement, banana orchards and sugarcane fields, according to rice grower Gada Hussain Mahesar. In such a situation, the passage of floodwater builds pressure on barrages when flows get blocked.

“Only in 2015 we noticed sugarcane fields on hundreds of acres in katcha area were serving as obstacle to floodwater’s passage Sukkur downstream, putting river dyke under constant threat of being broken, but luckily it was avoided,” says Noor Mohammad Baloch, a former chief engineer at Guddu Barrage. “Riverine area is to be kept free of everything,” he argues.

The Sindh government introduce a piece of legislation to get natural waterways restored after 2011 heavy rains coupled with breaches in the Left Bank Outfall Drain caused massive damages in lower Sindh. However, no progress has been made since to achieve this goal. It’s time the Sindh government did something about it as changing climate has made extreme weather events more unpredictable.

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, July 24th, 2017