|
Issues & Analysis
Water Management, Debt and
Privatisation
Water-sharing issue comes to a head
By Kaleem Omar
Punjab rejects federal government's revocation of the
1991 Indus inter-provincial water accord
On Friday the Punjab Irrigation
Department in Lahore received a letter from the federal
Ministry of Water and Power in Islamabad revoking the decision
of the 1994 inter-ministerial committee on the sharing of
water among the four provinces, under the terms of the 1991
Water Accord. A senior Punjab Irrigation Department official
said that a reply would be sent to the ministry in a few days
after reviewing the legal and other aspects of the letter. He
said that the matter would also be discussed in the
forthcoming meeting of the Indus River System Authority (ISRA)
in Islamabad on July 17.
In a related development, the Punjab Water Council and the
Pakistan Water Policy Forum have reportedly rejected the
decision of the Ministry of Water and Power dismissing the
inter-ministerial committee's interpretation of the 1991 Water
Accord. In a meeting in Lahore on Friday, several independent
water experts expressed displeasure over the ministry's
decision. They said that, as a result of the decision, Punjab
- the country's biggest grower of major crops - would "suffer
a lot." They claimed that Sindh's point of view on the sharing
of Indus waters was "unjustified," adding that, "the federal
government should immediately withdraw its decision as ISRA
has no right to dismiss its own decision." The Punjab Water
Council has also rejected the ministry's decision, claiming
that recent developments in the country relating to the water
issue would "further increase misunderstanding among the
provinces." A PWC representative said that the federal
government's decision means that, "the 1991 Water Accord is no
longer valid."
All this suggests that the brouhaha over the sharing of the
Indus waters issue, which had been building up for the last
several years, as a result of the drought, continuing high
population growth, and the rising demand for water in the
agricultural sector, industry and the rapidly expanding urban
agglomerations, has now come to a head. This makes it all the
more imperative that the issue be urgently resolved in a
planned manner on the basis of improved water-management
practices, equity and respect for the riparian rights of all
the four provinces.
The capacity of Pakistan to produce enough food to feed a much
larger population is not really in doubt. For one thing, it
has some of the most hardworking farmers in the world, who
have already shown that they can feed a population that, at
140 million, is today some four times larger than West
Pakistan's population in 1947. Despite this massive increase,
Pakistan is still basically self-sufficient in food, though it
does occasionally important some wheat. It is also an exporter
of several food crops, including rice, fruit and vegetables.
With better seeds and cropping techniques, and improved water
and land management practices, Pakistan's food exports can be
increased many fold and become an important source of higher
foreign currency earnings, thereby improving the country's
trade balance and reducing pressure on its balance of
payments. In other words, the old dream of making Pakistan
"the granary of the Middle East" is not a lost cause and can
still be realised. It will take good planning and a lot of
hard work, of course, but it can be done. The main problem
standing in the way of realising this dream is developing
additional supplies of water. Given the political will,
however, even this problem can be tackled.
Millions of acres of good fallow land in Balochistan and other
parts of the country can be brought under cultivation with the
construction of low-head dams and check-dams to impound
billions of gallons of rain runoff water a year that continues
to flow unutilised into the sea. There are also still huge
underground reservoirs of water that can be tapped for farming
and other uses.
To cite only one example, a groundwater survey carried out in
1980, and financed by the Kuwait Loan Fund, found that in
Balochistan alone, the first 150-kilometre-stretch of the
coastal region west of the mouth of the Hub River had large
underground reservoirs of semi-brackish water that is
perfectly suitable for agriculture and can be tapped through
the installation of a network of tubewells and interlinked
distribution pipelines to deliver 90 million gallons of water
a day to the Karachi region.
At 1980 prices, the foreign currency cost of the whole scheme
was estimated at $ 42 million. The Kuwait Loan Fund was
prepared to give Pakistan the money. For some inexplicable
reason, however, that remains unclear to this day, the
Zia-ul-Haq government decided not to take up the Kuwaiti offer
and the scheme was shelved. It could still be revived,
however, though it would now cost a lot more, of course. Even
so, the money to build the scheme can still be found, given
the political will on the government's part to go ahead with
the project.
For the first time in years, we now have a government that
seems determined to build more water reservoirs in Balochistan,
Punjab, the Northern Areas and other parts of the country. The
Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) has now been
directed by the Musharraf government to press ahead with some
of these schemes, including the Mirani Dam and the Hingol Dam
in the Mekran region of southern Balochistan. Work on these
two projects is due to begin next month. Other water projects
are also in the pipeline, including the preparation of a
detailed feasibility report for the mega Bhasha Dam in the
Northern Areas.
Although water-management programmes have become increasingly
sophisticated, political stresses have compounded Pakistan's
water problems. The result is paradoxical: as water-resource
information and planning advance, so do river basin problems.
Add the issue of climate change, and the uncertainties become
overwhelming. It is not that climate change is unimaginable.
As this correspondent pointed in these columns last week,
scientists have been studying paleoclimatic change in the
Indus for a century. But managing the Indus is now so complex,
interdependent and contingent upon international events that
the cascade of potential climate change impacts as a result of
global warming and other factors seems impossible to envisage.
So much rides on the sustainability of the Indus, however, not
just for Pakistan's agrarian economy but for the country's
economic growth as a whole, that the need to take climate
change seriously can no longer be ignored.
Global climate models fail to simulate existing monsoon
patterns, undermining the credibility of CO2 warming
scenarios. Climate models and river basin models have
different spatial configurations, requiring further
modification of climate change scenarios. In Pakistan's case,
only the Jhelum River has been modeled in the upper basin, so
runoff scenarios in adjacent watersheds had to be derived from
sub-basins of the Jhelum, introducing problems of correlation
and scale. Glaciological processes in the main stem of the
upper Indus could not be modeled due to a lack of data and
scientific knowledge.
In 1989, however, the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEAPA)
commissioned a study on the effects of global climate change
on several river basins in developing countries, including the
Indus River basin. The Pakistan study, which was carried out
by Professor James L. Wescoat, Jr. of the University of
Colorado at Boulder, one of the world's leading water experts,
and colleagues of his from Pakistan's WAPDA, focused on water
resources impacts in the Indus River basin.
As Professor Wescoat notes in his research paper "Managing the
Indus River basin in the light of climate change", the study
began with a scenario assessment, using the Jhelum River (UBC)
model to assess hydrologic impacts in the upper basin and to
generate inflows to the main system. The Indus Basin Model was
used to assess economic and water management impacts in the
main system.
As Professor Wescoat notes, the strengths of this approach are
its clarity and logic. The criteria for a successful scenario
assessment are: plausible climate scenarios; an unbroken chain
of analysis that stretches from climate change through
hydrologic impacts and water management impact to adjustments;
a procedure that has the confidence and commitment of river
basin managers; and output in the form of viable policy
alternatives.
Difficulties were encountered in applying the scenario
assessment approach in the Indus basin despite the cooperation
of an outstanding WAPDA team of Pakistani engineers, planners
and scientists. But once upper basin inflows were projected at
the rim stations, the Indus Basin Model (IBMR) was used to
assess impacts on the plains.
First, hydroclimatologic date in the IBMR were modified.
Because the model used pan evaporation and crop water
requirements rather than temperature to estimate consumptive
water use, temperature scenarios and water use were derived
independently. The model also used a monthly time step and
mean data that dampened out inter-annual variability,
seasonality and extreme events. As Professor Wescoat notes, a
20 per cent change in monthly runoff is well within the range
of water management experience, but a 20 per cent increase in
extreme flows would breach every bund and barrage in the
system. Some of the most difficult problems - salinity,
drainage and flooding - can only be crudely assessed within
the IBMR model. Finally, no model of the Indus main system can
guage raw hydrologic impacts, because the entire system is
subject to human intervention and control.
As Professor Wescoat notes, the Indus basin model does help
assess social impacts and adjustments to climate change. It
provides output for land use, water use, production patterns,
and farm revenues at various levels of aggregation - canal
command, province, agroclimatic zone, and the irrigated basin
as a whole. It includes a complex array of cropping
technologies, farm budgets, labour variables, water allocation
rules, and investment possibilities that can be varied to
gauge the efficacy of adjustment to climate impacts.
The number of adjustment combinations is enormous. But each
model run requires six hours of computer time and produces
about 100 pages of output, so only a small number of
well-designed adjustment alternatives can reasonably be
examined. Moreover, because the model optimized government
and/or farmer irrigation decisions, thousands of adjustments
are built into every organisation run. Most of them cannot be
directly inferred from model output. The model assumes that
decision makers are economically "rational," but it is
calibrated with data reflecting all the problems mentioned
above.
Three types of analogy have been employed in climate impacts
research. The most common involves previous instances of
climate change in historic, protohistoric, or prehistoric
times. As Professor Wescoat notes, the more recent the
"Climate analog" the more it may reveal about adjustment in
complex societies. In the case of the Indus, some
archaeologists believe warming occurred in the second
millennium BC, triggering massive environmental and cultural
adjustments. Others have disputed the regional applicability
of local paleoclimatic evidence and questioned the importance
of climate in protohistoric social change.
A second type of analogy involves hydrometeorological
phenomena such as floods and droughts. It is in this context
that the drought currently affecting Pakistan becomes even
more relevant. As Professor Wescoat notes, although not
climatic phenomena, per se, extreme events illuminate
short-term adjustments that may be analogous to long-term
adjustments. For example, 1990 was a warm wet year in the
upper Indus. Snowmelt came early. The warm weather was
analogous to climate change scenarios in the upper basin, so
the chief of Dam Operations and Power (WAPDA) kept a detailed
record of problems and actions taken during this period to
include in his discussion of the potential effects of climate
change in reservoir operations.
A third type of analogy is not climate related. For example,
partition led to a diminution of river flows into Pakistan and
the signing of the Indus Waters Treaty with India in 1960,
under the auspices of the World Bank, followed by the
construction of dams (Mangla and Tarbela), barrages (Chashma)
and link canals to transfer water from the western rivers
(Indus, Jhelum and Chenab) into the affected areas that were
fed by the waters of the three eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas and
Sutlej) that had been exclusively allocated to India under the
terms of the treaty. These engineering adjustments, built to
deal with dwindling water supplies, provide a useful analogy
for some climate change scenarios.
Some effects of those climate change scenarios are already
being felt in Pakistan, in the form of the drought that has
gripped the country for the last three years, causing a sharp
fall in river flows and underground water supplies. The fall
in river flows has badly affected the agrarian economies of
Punjab and Sindh, while the fall in underground water supplies
has hit Balochistan, in particular, very hard. The recent
rains have eased the situation somewhat, but that is still no
reason for complacency and only serves to underscore the need
for a better water-management programme. The government needs
to make such a programme a matter of the highest national
priority.
The News- July 15
|
Other News
|
