NAGARPARKAR: Unusually articulate for a female member of the minority Hindu community, Naazo Kohli has a point when she insists that the recent monsoon rains may have recharged the ever-lowering water table in Tharparkar and given a new lease of life to the livestock, but they seem to have put government plans about recurring droughts on the backburner.
The torrential rains, which wrought untold devastation in other areas of Sindh, transformed the bleak and desolate landscape of Tharparkar.
All a post-monsoon visitor to the rangeland now sees are a standing millet crop, drought-resistant moringa trees, leaf-heavy castor plants and the Karoonjhar Hills green with new growth.
But Naazo, her forearms covered with yellowish-white ivory bangles indicating her marital status, recalls that her family not only ran up debts of thousands of rupees during the last drought but also trekked to barrage-irrigated areas to save their dying livestock.
“Eighty per cent of the people in Thar depend on livestock for their livelihood. Life-threatening and recurring droughts push them further into poverty,” she says.
According to the latest economic survey of Pakistan, the livestock sector contributes almost 50 per cent to the value addition in the agriculture sector and almost 11 per cent to Pakistan’s GDP, which is higher than the contribution made by the crop sector.
“Despite decades of neglect, Pakistan is the fifth largest milk producer in the world,” says the government document.
Octogenarian Nawaz Khosa, who worked as a watchful police officer under the British government and is a mine of information on Thar, says there is only one solution to the arid region’s drought issue: water storage reservoirs.
“At least six dams were constructed by the Junejo government. One by one, they all crumbled into dust. I cannot stress enough the importance of building retention dams to store rainwater and recharge downstream aquifers,” he says.
“We are all thankful to the government for transforming cart tracks into metalled roads coming to Nagarparkar, connecting the border town with the national power grid and allowing telephone companies to operate here. But what we need is drinking water, all year round.”
According to Younus Bandhani, a representative of an active non-governmental organisation, there are 12 small dams in Nagarparkar.
“They are not storage reservoirs. Built by NGOs, these dams do not allow torrents from the Karoonjhar Hills to rush to the Rann of Katchh. Whatever little agricultural activity that you see here is due to these dams, because they recharge downstream aquifers,” explains Mr Bandhani pointing to the cereal crop that currently dominates the landscape in Nagarparkar.
Standing on the embankment of the Seengaro dam with his cattle grazing hard by, teenage Wala Mohammad says rainwater stored by the dam would be consumed within four months.
“And then there will little grazing left in the Karoonjhar hills. Our animals will be forced to eat ‘bheer’, a type of grass that brings on a stomach disease in livestock. We will take our livestock to greener pastures,” he says, adding that he does not want to leave the thatched cottage in which he was born and in which he recently got married.
While an unlettered herdsman like Wala is aware of the acute need for dams in all the four talukas of the Tharparkar district, the government has done little more than making vague promises about constructing water reservoirs.
Nagarparkar Mukhtiarkar Pariyal Khan Chandio says the government is planning to build dams. But he adds in the same breath that he does not know how many dams are being constructed and where. Mr Chandio insists that there is no need to set up a special drought fund – a popular demand in the Thar area – because droughts do not occur with alarming frequency.
However, Mirpurkhas-based scholar Prof Murad Ali Rahimoon, who has written well-researched papers on famines and droughts in Thar, says that a drought occurs in the Thar region every few years.
“The worst Thar droughts broke out in 1556, 1574, 1598, 1632, 1770, 1815, 1869, 1876 (Chhapno), 1939 (Chhanwo), 1968, 1987 and 1999. With this kind of drought record in Thar, I don’t think there is any room for complacency,” he says.