I did not get to hear General Musharraf’s, by all accounts, very impassioned appeal for a national consensus on construction of additional storage on the Indus River.
But I was quite dismayed upon reading the text of it through the print media the day after the speech, here in the USA. General Musharraf’s speech was full of all the cliches and alarmist half-truths that many of us in the water resources field have come to expect from our erstwhile engineers of Wapda and provincial irrigation departments variety.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt, could it be that the engineers are the only ones that he is listening to? The entire controversy regarding the construction of additional storage on the Indus is punctuated by distortions and false assumptions, both technically and ideologically. I would like to address and challenge some of those assumptions below.
The first and foremost assumption underlying the government’s case for additional storage is that engineers are the only relevant ‘expert,’ disinterested, and patriotic group involved in the controversy and everybody else, e.g., the odious NGOwallahs, environmentalists, concerned scientists, politicians and the general public of certain ethnicities are ‘well—either ignorant, agents of the West, India or the Zionists (take your pick),corrupt, power hungry, anti-national and/or anti-development. Does it then follow that water resources management is purely an issue of shovelling more dirt and finding the right crushing strengths of construction materials, for example? Do pure hydrologists, geomorphologists, biologists, botanists, geographers, anthropologists, social workers and— yes, even politicians, have any role to play in the water management sphere?
This leads me to the second fallacious assumption underlying General Musharraf’s address, that construction of storage is a purely technical issue! Since when did an issue, which may displace thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis, and may irreversably change the ecology, hydrology, geography and social relations within the Indus basin become purely technical?
Indeed the engineers have a role to play in the management and development of water resources in Pakistan but to think that it is their sole preserve will be naive at best and dangerously counter-productive at worst. Here in the United States even such previously incorrigible dam builders as the US Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation have started to have doubts about their dam-building missions, but I guess, no such humility or introspection is to be expected from their admirers and disciples in the Pakistani engineering establishment.
Third, Wapda and the Pakistani engineering community’s single-minded focus on more dam construction is hardly disinterested or altruistic. Wapda and the provincial irrigation departments in their genus were organizations geared towards large-scale construction projects. It is this institutional inertia, which is largely to blame for their mega-project fetish. Today many of the problems associated with the Pakistani water sector, especially the irrigation sector are not of insufficient supplies but rather of poor operations and maintenance.
It is not just me talking but every independent study on the Pakistani water sector that I am aware of talking. But our water managers continue to have blinders towards the disastrous state of our existing infrastructure and the inefficiencies, inequities and injustices that have become endemic to the system. It seems that contrary to international and national independent research all of Wapda-funded research is only about more dam construction!
Fourth, even if one were to take Wapda’s and its little sisters Irsa’s and irrigation departments’ claims at their face value they simply do not hold up to scrutiny. Consider the simple mathematics that the Pakistani irrigation system withdraws about 106 maf (million acre feet) of water in an average year from the Indus River. The conveyance efficiency of the system is about 30, per cent,i.e., 70 per cent of the withdrawn water is lost to seepage and evaporation, which translates into 74 maf of water lost. But not all of this water is lost because 64 per cent of the irrigated area of Pakistan has usable ground water.
Therefore making the rather generous assumption that there are no evaporative losses about 47.5 maf of water is still available through groundwater exploitation while the remainder 26.7 maf is lost to saline ground water. Simply improving the conveyance efficiency in the saline groundwater zone through canal lining or underground water conveyance to say 50 per cent will make available an additional 7.6 maf of water in the saline ground water areas, which is where the water scarcity is really acute and urgent.
This is more water than will be made available if one were to go with General Musharraf’s figures of 7.3 and 6.1 maf from the Bhasha and Kalabagh dams respectively and without the economic, social, political and environmental costs. The above are very rough calculation and I am sure more sophisticated calculations with greater attention to the timing of water availability may yield different results, but the basic point about improving management as a first priority rather than shovelling more dirt will be borne out by any calculations undertaken any which ever way.
With the ongoing conjunctive use of groundwater and surface water it is a myth that there is an absolute scarcity of irrigation water in the fresh groundwater zones. The real scarcity is in the saline groundwater zones, which —you guessed it— are predominantly in the Sindh province of Pakistan.
Indeed let there be a meaningful debate on the issue, but no name calling please. People against dams are just as patriotic as the next Wapda engineer or President General Musharraf himself. Water development and management like any other sphere of life is a deeply political and social issue in addition to a technical issue. Engineers cannot wish away the complexities of resource management as many of them experience in their field tenures as SDOs and Xens, just because they have no conceptual or intellectual tools to tackle those complexity.
The problem of water management is multi-faceted and it requires multi-disciplinary solutions (engineers are welcome, we non-engineers tend to be a little more inclusive). Here it would be useful to point out that it is not just Wapda engineers who abuse numbers to suit their needs the many nationalists and politicians in Sindh and NWFP are at times equally guilty.
The point is not so much to prove one party right over the other but to point out that there is a huge range of choice and it is rather the vested interests salivating over fat construction contracts, or honest engineers fulfilling their professional callings or unimaginative leadership in the field that is limiting our choices between simply to build or not to build a dam, or two.
(Daanish Mustafa, is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of South Florida.)