WITH a long, hot summer looming ahead, the last thing the country needs is two provinces fighting over water. Yet, that is precisely where things seem to be headed. Prompted into action by farmers’ protests, the PPP, the ruling party in Sindh, has been poking and prodding the PMLN-led federal government to shelve the now deeply controversial Cholistan canals project, part of this regime’s Green Pakistan Initiative. It has recently started threatening to withdraw its support for the coalition government if this ‘demand’ is not heard. This does not seem to have gone down well with the other PML-N government — the one ruling from Lahore — which last week accused the PPP of ‘doing politics’ on the issue. “It is documented, it is signed,” Punjab Information Minister Azma Bokhari had said in a rejoinder to PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari rejecting the project, referencing the claim that President Asif Ali Zardari had lent it his approval — although he had asserted in his speech to parliament last month that he could not support the canal proposal.

More recently, however, the Punjab government has outright accused Sindh of “eating into” its fair share of the water by cheating the system. In a recent letter to the Indus River System Authority, Punjab’s Irrigation Department accused Sindh of “underreporting discharge data”, especially at the Guddu and Sukkur barrages, as a result of which it received “additional water” while Punjab received less than its share. Clearly, this is a spat that has the potential of turning rather ugly and could also trigger a flaring up of ethno-nationalist tensions. It would be in the national interest, therefore, if the Council of Common Interests were to convene at the earliest and arbitrate the dispute fairly. The Sindh chief minister, who believes that his province has a strong case and evidence to back it up, should be given a fair hearing, as should the chief minister of Punjab, who seems to believe her province’s rightful share of water resources is not being given to it. It must be pointed out that petitions against several new water projects, including the Cholistan canal, have been pending before the CCI for quite some time, but the Council has failed to deliberate on them. Given that drought-like conditions are already threatening agricultural output in large parts of the country, this matter needs to be settled at the earliest so that no party can claim they were cheated out of their entitlement.

Published in Dawn, April 16th, 2025