KARACHI, July 24: Speakers at a meeting on Thursday said that there was sufficient water available to fulfil all the country’ needs but there was a need to adopt good management practices and to conserve water.

They were speaking at the “Dialogue on emerging water issues and livelihood of people” organised by Shirkat Gah. They said that almost half of the available irrigation water was lost due to seepages in the distribution network which could easily be saved.

The former Sindh irrigation secretary, Idrees Rajput, said that approximately 130 million acre feet (MAF) water was available in the Indus river system and almost half of it – nearly 60MAF – was lost due to seepages in the distribution system – canals, distributaries, water courses, etc – which could be saved if these were lined.

He also suggested that priority be given to rainwater harvesting by constructing small check dams to collect water from the hill torrents.

Mr Rajput said that there were a large number of hill torrents northwest of the province -- in the hilly areas of Kohistan – and at the South-eastern tip of Sindh in Nagar Parkar – in Karoonjhar Hills -- and on each of these three to four small check dams could be constructed to meet the local water requirement.

He also suggested that low water requiring crops be planted and drip and sprinkle irrigation system should be studied.

Dr Ghulam Akber of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said that the Indus Delta was shrinking fast owing to the lesser water coming through the Indus River over the years.

He said that the river brought hundreds of thousands of tons of silt with its water that supplemented the delta area making it fertile on the one hand and stopping the inland intrusion of sea water on the other. He said that mangrove forests in the delta had shrunk and so had the fish catch which had financially crippled the fishing community.

He said many fresh water lakes in the coastal areas had turned saline while the famous Palla fish that in the early 1900s used to travel up to Multan, now, owing to manmade barriers, construction of various reservoirs and barrages upstream to regulate and store the river water, hardly travelled up to Kotri.

Ibrar Kazi of the Sindh Democratic Front said that if the water currently available in the irrigation system was used efficiently there was no need for building big reservoirs. He said that another reason for the prevailing opposition of the construction of big dams by smaller provinces was that they feared that upstream provinces, which would be regulating the river flows, would manipulate the downstream water supply.

He said that Sindh needed water in April – May for sowing but rather than providing water, it was stored in the Mangla Dam at that time.

Tahir Qureshi of the IUCN said that less water coming to the delta had resulted in sea intrusion and now saline water could be seen up to 57 kilometres upstream from the sea in the river course. He suggested that a study to determine the sea level rise be conducted so that its effects could be determined.

Zulfiqar Halipoto, Sadeqa Salahuddin, Nizam Nizamani, Saleh Jatt, Ishaq Soomro, Nasir Panhwar, Zubaida Birwani, and others also spoke.