KARACHI: Renowned political economist Dr Kaiser Bengali on Saturday contested the Punjab Irsa member’s claim that water flows into the sea were causing an annual loss of $29 billion and dismissed the claim that “coming generations would die of hunger” as irresponsible sensational.

In a statement, Dr Bengali, who is the author of a book titled Political Economy of Water, accused the “water lobby” of trying to play God and restructure nature. Nature, he said, had created a balanced system where rivers flow into the sea and keep the latter from intruding inland.

“However, restriction of river Indus water flow over the last 100 years on account of construction of barrages and dams has caused 56 kilometres of land to be consumed by the sea,” he said. “A whole union council of arable land is now under the sea and tens of thousands of families have lost their livelihoods and are now environmental refugees. This is the economic and human cost that Thatta and Badin districts of Sindh have borne and should form part of any cost calculation.”

Dr Bengali said that dams did not produce water; they only stored available water and with 40 per cent of irrigation water failing to reach plant roots, every Rs100 spent on creating storage would mean Rs40 down the drain.

“The solution to Pakistan’s water crisis is not to create more storage for erratic water availability, but to use available water more efficiently; which requires investment in water conservation technology: a shift away from flood irrigation to technologies like drip irrigation. It also requires a shift towards more water-efficient cropping patterns,” he added.

Published in Dawn, January 19th, 2020