By Mohsin Leghari
When a country’s central bank devotes a full chapter to water, the crisis has moved beyond rainfall. In its 2016–17 Annual Report, the State Bank of Pakistan treated water sustainability as macroeconomic risk and pointed quietly but unmistakably towards the real fault line: distorted pricing, weak regulation, poor enforcement, and the absence of credible measurement.
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Pakistan has achieved something rare twice in three decades: it forged genuine cross-provincial consensus on water. The 1991 Water Apportionment Accord pulled the federation back from a paralysing dispute and created a rules-based framework for sharing the Indus. In 2018, the National Water Policy (NWP) went further, setting Pakistan’s first integrated national framework for irrigation, cities, environment, hydropower and climate risk.
Both were celebrated as turning points. Both documents are, on paper, world-class, yet the lived reality keeps mocking the promise.
Today, Pakistan is already below, or hovering around, the conventional “scarcity” threshold of 1,000 cubic metres per person per year and still falling Yet even in years of “full reservoirs”, tail-end farmers watch canals die before the last outlets, aquifers continue to drop, and the delta continues to weaken. The focus has to shift from “not enough water” to “not enough governance”.
The NWP’s own baseline remains the most devastating diagnosis we have ever published. The Indus system receives about 138.4 million acre-feet (MAF) annually. Roughly 104 MAF is diverted at canal headworks, but only 58.3 MAF reaches the farm gate. The remaining 46.7 MAF nearly half of what is diverted disappears within the delivery system through seepage, operational spills, and unauthorised withdrawals.
Pakistan’s live storage buffer under 14 MAF, amounts to roughly one-tenth of average annual flows, compared to Global Average of about 35%, leaving the country exposed to droughts, heatwaves, and sudden variability. Meanwhile, the policy recorded what every citizen already sees: very low wastewater treatment, with cities discharging untreated effluent into rivers and drains. Add the unregulated mining of groundwater across much of the basin, and the picture is clear: this is not a “scarcity surprise”.
It is a governance choice repeated daily.
The policy did more than lament. It set yardsticks: reduce canal losses, add storage, strengthen institutions, install real-time telemetry for credible measurement, and move progressively towards cost recovery at least for operation and maintenance in productive uses.
Seven years later, the scorecard shows movement, but not transformation. Financing illustrates the pattern. For PSDP 2025–26, the government specified Rs 133.424 billion for ongoing hydel and water sector projects. At the same time, the water sector’s throw-forward has been reported around Rs 1.27 trillion—meaning annual allocations cover only a fraction of what is already in the pipeline.
This is exactly how long-gestation water portfolios stall: commitments pile up, allocations swing year to year, execution slows, costs rise, and the public is told to blame “nature”.
On storages, the story is more encouraging but still incomplete. Diamer-Basha and Mohmand are finally under construction. Their published project features show live storage of 6.40 MAF for Diamer-Basha and 0.676 MAF for Mohmand—together roughly 7 MAF of added live storage once commissioned This matters. But storages alone cannot substitute for fixing a delivery system that loses tens of MAF after diversion.
On measurement, the basis of inter-provincial trust, the gap is more corrosive. Telemetry was meant to end the age of “my gauge versus your gauge”. Instead, a revamped 27-site Indus telemetry system contract was awarded in 2024 with commissioning planned for December 2026. In a federation built on mistrust, delayed measurement is not a technical delay; it is a political accelerant.
And on the hardest reforms, pricing, groundwater regulation, and loss reduction progress remains minimal. Canal charges are still too low in real terms to fund proper maintenance. Groundwater licensing and metering remains absent across most of the basin. Urban utilities still struggle with revenue, leakages and enforcement. These are precisely the reforms that carry the highest political cost, and they remain the most deferred.
Why does paper keep losing to politics?
First, soft instruments lose to hard politics. The Accord is a political agreement; the Policy is policy. When short-term posturing collides with long-term national interest, paper loses. Second, authority is scattered across federal and provincial actors who seldom operate as one system. Third, there are no consequences: targets exist, but there are few binding timelines, penalties, or performance accountability. Fourth, money flows to ribbon-cutting projects more easily than to the unglamorous fundamentals like measurement, maintenance, drainage, wastewater treatment, and enforcement. Fifth, mistrust never went away: every dry season resurrects accusations, disputes over gauges, and competing “facts”.
Pakistan does not need a new grand document. It needs to give teeth to the two it already has.
Federally, the core inter-provincial rulebook, shares, shortage-sharing, transparent measurement, minimum environmental protections, and clear operating rules for storages—should be anchored in enforceable statute and procedures, not reopened as a political argument every season. IRSA’s authority should be clarified and strengthened, backed by credible measurement, independent audits, and time-bound dispute resolution.
Provincially, autonomy must stop being a slogan and become accountability. Within their shares, provinces should enforce groundwater regulation, realistic charging and collections for O&M, and incentives that reward efficiency rather than volume. Provinces can innovate differently. Punjab, Sindh, KP, Balochistan do not need identical instruments, but minimum standards should be common on transparency, environment, and basic rights.
Everything must rest on one set of numbers everyone can see. Real-time telemetry at every inter-provincial control point, tamper-resistant, independently audited, should be treated as foundational infrastructure, not optional technology. Data should be published live and summarised annually as “water accounts” laid before Parliament and all four provincial assemblies: who took how much, how it was used, what was invested, what improved, what deteriorated.
Then financing can finally follow performance. A modest slice of federal development funds and concessional finance can be tied to measurable benchmarks: functioning telemetry, notified and enforced groundwater rules in critical zones, treated effluent in major cities, verified environmental flows where mandated, and demonstrable improvement in tail-end reliability in selected canals.
In 1991 and again in 2018, Pakistan proved it can rise above parochialism to draft serious water compacts.
What it has never done is live by them. The documents are not the problem. Our refusal to treat them as binding contracts is. Until we match policy with enforcement—law, measurement, steady money, and consequences, Pakistan’s water story will remain what it is today: not a tragedy of nature, but a chronicle of unkept promises.
