A couple of years ago, we had torrential rains around Koh-i-Suleman range.

The water flowed down and filled the Manchar Lake and inundated most areas on the right bank of Indus. This inundation destroyed crops and took away the livelihood of poor farmers.

I travelled by road in January this year, one year after those rains, and found that rainwater was still standing. According to water experts, the British did not want a barrage downstream of Sukkur Barrage because of low gradient, which is only 65 metres above the sea level. The river snakes around towards the sea and travels some 400 kilometres. The gradient of 65 metres across the 400km stretch to the sea is too low for 900,000 cusecs of water that typically pass Sukkur Barrage during high floods. The construction of canals with huge canal banks from Ghulam Mohammad Barrage traps the floodwater and restricts its movement to the sea. Also, new network of roads with embank-ments also stops the water from going to the sea.

Consequently, the fertile agricultural lands take more than a year to get dry and ready for the next crop. The farmers, meanwhile, survive shelterless on alms.

Having this background, we still need to identify areas where we can store surplus rainwater in Sindh to become self-reliant. We can easily make 10,000 big and small lakes in shallow areas of Sindh from Guddu Barrage/Koh-i-Suleman to Manchar Lake all the way up to Ghulam Mohammad Barrage.

We can also increase Manchar Lake area by 10, 20 or 50 times in addition

to other existing lakes to increase its capacity. The fresh rainwater addition will decrease the concentration of poisonous content in Manchar Lake. Once the lakes are there, we can lease them out to landless farmers, and train them in fish farming, instead of traditional rice and wheat cultivation.

The per-acre earning of fish-farming is about four times higher than the crops of rice and wheat. Minnesota in the United States has 10,000 lakes. We can transform Sindh into Pakistan’s Minnesota.

S. Nayyar Iqbal Raza
Karachi

Published in Dawn, December 20th, 2023