Cheap water is not cheap

By Mohsin Leghari

At the tail of a distributary, the crisis does not arrive as theory. It arrives as an empty turn. The water is due, but the channel runs thin. Silt has narrowed the flow. A gate upstream does not regulate properly. An embankment was patched, not repaired. The crop waits for its last irrigation and the farmer watches a field that needed water yesterday.

This is how Pakistan’s irrigation failure now appears. Not first in policy papers or committee rooms, but in the missed turn, the weak flow, the light grain, and the tubewell switched on in desperation.

Yet we still cling to one comforting fiction: that cheap canal water is a kindness to the farmer.

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It is not. For decades, Pakistan has run the largest contiguous irrigation system in the world on water charges so low that they no longer sustain the system that delivers the water. We call this support. We defend it as relief. In truth, it is underpricing dressed up as compassion, and its result is not justice but decay.

This was not always the governing logic.

Under British rule, canal irrigation in Punjab was never treated as a charitable public service. It was a fiscal enterprise. Water was priced. Land values rose. Revenue was extracted. The purpose was imperial, not benevolent, but the financial logic was clear: if the state built canals, the canals were expected to earn.

Pakistan rightly rejected the purpose of that model. What it did not replace it with was any equally serious discipline for keeping the system alive. Canal water slowly ceased to be treated as a service that had to finance maintenance. It became a politically sensitive favour, underpriced in the name of the farmer and defended in the language of welfare.

That is the real inversion in our irrigation system. A network once treated as a productive asset is now run as a subsidised service without the revenue to maintain itself. We expect canals to be desilted, gates repaired, regulators maintained, embankments strengthened, and drains kept functional, while refusing to charge enough for even basic upkeep.

Once recovery collapses, maintenance follows.

Channels silt up. Structures weaken. Drainage deteriorates. Breaches become more frequent. A fiscal shortfall turns into a physical one. The decline does not stay in a budget document. It moves downstream. It settles into the distributary. It shows up in the farmer’s field.

But the deepest fallacy in the cheap-water argument is not simply that it is uneconomic. It is that it is sold as pro-poor.

In practice, it is often the opposite.

Head-reach users with relatively secure access receive canal water at symbolic cost. Tail-end farmers, already the weakest in the chain, are pushed into failed turns, stressed crops, light harvests, and expensive tubewell dependence. What appears on paper as a subsidy to agriculture often works in the field as an anti-tail transfer. It rewards those best placed in the system and punishes those least able to absorb failure.

That is why the phrase cheap water is so misleading. Cheap for whom?

Cheap for the influential head-reach user who continues to receive a public resource at token cost. Not cheap for the tail-end farmer who pays for weak maintenance through lower yields and private pumping. Not cheap for the small cultivator who must borrow to run a diesel engine because the canal did not deliver when the crop needed it most.

There is another bill too, and it is even more dangerous because it is less visible.

When the canal system weakens, farmers do what rational people do. They turn to groundwater. The tubewell becomes insurance against a failing public network. But this is not a free adjustment. It is a transfer of cost from the provincial ledger to the aquifer. What the state refuses to recover through abiana, it forces society to pay through falling water tables, higher pumping costs, worsening groundwater quality, and the steady exhaustion of a strategic reserve that should never have been treated as a substitute for canal maintenance.

So the subsidy never truly disappears. It simply changes form.

We underfund the canals and overdraw the aquifer.

That is the truth Pakistan’s water politics still refuses to face. Low abiana is not a neutral concession to the farmer. It is a transfer from the future into the present. It allows today’s political class to avoid an honest conversation while passing the real bill to tomorrow’s agriculture. That bill is paid in silted channels, weakened structures, tail-end scarcity, groundwater depletion, and rising inequality within the command area.

None of this means returning to colonial logic. The British priced water to serve empire, not justice. Pakistan must price water to preserve a public system fairly. But one lesson remains valid: infrastructure of this scale cannot survive if the state lacks either the will to charge for service or the credibility to show that payment will improve delivery.

That credibility is crucial. Farmers will not pay more simply because the government asks. Nor should they. They will pay more only when they can see that collections lead to desilting, repairs, stronger banks, better regulation, and more reliable delivery, especially at the tail. Reform cannot be a blunt tariff shock. It has to be phased, transparent, and tied to actual service. But one fiction must end now: the idea that underpricing water is an act of mercy.

It is not mercy to keep the tariff low and the canal broken.

It is not mercy to protect a slogan and abandon a system.

It is not mercy to spare the farmer a public charge only to force him into a private crisis.

Cheap water is not cheap.

It is a false kindness that leaves the canal weak, the tail-end dry, and the aquifer picking up the bill.

The writer is a former senator, member of the National Assembly, and Punjab minister for irrigation and finance, and currently serves as senior water governance expert with UNDP’s National Governance Programme.