This business of water




By Shahid Javed Burki


THERE are moments in a nation’s history when those who occupy policymaking positions must have the courage to take difficult decisions. They are difficult since their benefits are not immediately apparent but the cost of postponing them can be very great.

My reference here is to the question of water and how best Pakistan can marshal this resource, conserve it for use over a period of time, make an efficient use of what is currently available and distribute it in a way that no segment of society is deprived of this essential need.

Since the subject of water and its appropriate use is a very complex one and since it is of critical importance for the economic, social and political future of the country, I will write a series of articles to provide an analysis of the approaches taken in the past and to suggest that the policymakers must adopt a somewhat different stance to tackle the problem the country confronts.

In the article today, I will argue that policymakers in Pakistan have traditionally used the technological approach to deal with the business of water. This approach served to solve whatever problem was faced by policy makers over the short term. However, over the long term the approach always left the country with serious long-term consequences.

Let me set the stage for discussing Pakistan’s water problem by what we know about the situation in the world, particularly in the developing countries. Water remains a plentiful resource; it runs through the many rivers that flow all over the world, connecting mountains with oceans, or taking water from lakes into the seas. Water falls as rain; and is available in large underground reservoirs. Vast quantities of it are available in the seas.

The use of sea water for human consumption is expensive since it involves desalination and that, in spite of some major developments in technology in recent years, remains a costly business. It is only done on an extensive scale in the oil rich countries of the Middle East that have a great deal of surplus energy to use for this purpose.

The Aral Sea in Central Asia is the most vivid example of the misuse of an important water resource. It has shrunk by as much as two-thirds of its original size as water was drawn during the Soviet era from the rivers that feed it. The tapped water was used for growing cotton in the area. Since cotton needs a lot of fertiliser, insecticides and pesticides, the chemicals used on the land ran into the rivers that flowed into the Aral Sea. Consequently the water that is left in the sea is over-salinated and polluted.

While the assault on the Aral Sea is the most egregious example of water’s misuse, the wasteful use of this precious resource happens all the time. The amount of water used in agriculture; as an industrial input; for everyday activities such as cooking, bathing, and maintaining lawns would be considerably less if it was properly priced. I will take up the subject of appropriate pricing of water in a later article.

There are many examples of misuse of water in Pakistan as well. The consequence of this is that Pakistan today is considered as one of the “water stressed” countries in the world where the per capita availability of water will outstrip its demand. The situation is likely to worsen quickly as global warming begins to take its toll and as the climate begins to change.

The most serious result of this will be that the amount of snows that fall on the Himalayas and other mountain ranges that feed the country’s many rivers will significantly decline. This will diminish by significant amounts the availability of water in the country’s rivers. Since the supply of water is inelastic — it cannot be increased beyond what nature is prepared to provide – public policy will have to step in with policies to conserve whatever is available.

The use of technology for solving a problem is usually an easier option compared to adopting policies that change the way people look at a particular resource. The most recent example of this is global warming where the American government in particular is very reluctant to use pricing as a way of curtailing the demand for energy. It is relying on the use of technologies. The current favourite is the production of bio-fuels.

However, the most effective way of dealing with this subject is through the pricing mechanism and the use of fiscal policies. This needs political will which Washington at this time does not seem able to muster.

Much of what has happened to Pakistan’s abundant water resource can be traced to the use of technology without reflecting on the secondary effect of this approach. The use of technology to exploit the abundant water resources of what is Pakistan today began during the British rule of India. Britain, having been alarmed by the large toll on human and animal life during recurrent famines in the densely populated provinces in the northeast, decided to bring water from the Indus River system to the uncultivated but potentially rich lands of the Punjab and Sindh.

The idea was to increase the domestic output of food grains to feed the people who faced famines almost every decade. A complicated system of canals was constructed that took stored water from the Indus and its many tributaries to the parched but fertile lands in India’s northwest.

However, land logging and salinity came with irrigation. These developments could have been avoided had the government taught the new farmers the correct use of water for irrigation. This was not done. The British — like all colonial masters — had a short time horizon. They were not concerned with the long-term development of their domain.

As the immediate problem was resolved by bringing virgin land available in Punjab and Sindh under the production of food grains, the British administration was not much concerned with the long term consequences of the investments they had made in developing irrigation.

Developing and applying the science of irrigation would have taken expenditure of resources and expense of time; the British were not prepared to spend either. Pakistan was left with the problem once the British departed.

That the problem had become acute was something Pakistani governments and scientists began to recognise in the 1950s. But the country was too preoccupied with politics to turn its attention to these kinds of issues.

The twin problems of water logging and salinity received government attention only after President Ayub Khan put a development minded administration in office. Deeply concerned about what was happening to the soil cover in many parts of the country, he appealed to the United States for help. During a meeting with President John Kennedy in Washington in 1961, he explained the problem to the American president who offered to help.

The American help came in the form of advice by Roger Ravelle, a Harvard University scientist with considerable repute and a vast amount of experience in the area. Ravelle assembled a team of experts in soil management and irrigation systems to develop a programme for Pakistan.

I will return to this technological solution to a problem created by the misuse of irrigation water a little later. Before returning to it, I will refer to another water problem and another technical solution for resolving it that left a deep mark on the country. This was the problem created by the messy division of Punjab that left the province’s large and integrated irrigation system divided in two parts. India laid claim to some of the waters of the Indus River system, particularly the water that flowed into the irrigation system from the head works that were now on the Indian side of the border. Diversion of this water would have created havoc on the Pakistani side.

There is growing evidence that the British administration headed in New Delhi by Lord Louis Mountbatten went out of its way to draw the Punjab border in favour of India, particularly to make it easier for it to access water from the irrigation works that were in place.

This is one of the themes in Stanley Wolpert’s latest book on the Indian partition. He uses government papers from that period to show how Mountbatten agreed to make last minute changes in the Punjab boundary line proposed by Sir Cyril Radcliffe to accommodate India.

At one point, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, fully aware that games were being played by the administration of Jawaharlal Nehru to cripple Pakistan economically, threatened to go to war if India tinkered with the irrigation system.

A technical solution was found to the problem during the tenure of President Ayub Khan when the two countries signed the Indus Water Treaty which apportioned three rivers of the system (the Indus, the Jhelum and the Chenab) to Pakistan and the remaining three (the Ravi, the Beas and the Sutlej) to India. In addition a multi-billion dollar scheme for building replacement works in Pakistan was agreed to by the two sides. To be implemented under the supervision of the World Bank, the vast programme envisaged the construction of link canals to transport water from the western to the eastern rivers. This meant cutting across the natural flow of water and contributed to the aggravation of the water-logging problem that was by then already very severe.

Tubewell technology arrived in the country in the early sixties in part to deal with the salinity and water logging problems. In the middle of that decade, Pakistan inaugurated the Salinity Control and Reclamation Project developed by Roger Revelle.The concept behind the project was a simple one. Large-bore tubewells were sunk in the saline areas and water brought out by them was thrown into the canals thus diluting its salinity. This helped to lower the water table and reduced soil-salinity. The farming community eagerly adopted this technology for their own use, augmenting with subsoil water the water that was available through the extensive system of canals. This eased the water constraint in many areas and also helped to place a check on the spread of salinity.

However, before the project could be declared a success, its ill effects began to be noted. Among them was the depletion of the aquifers formed over millions of years. Some of the water is “fossil water” that has accumulated underground for thousands of years, sometimes over half a million years, well before the end of the last ice age. Extracting this water at a rate which is greater than its natural replenishment eventually destroys the aquifers, with unimaginable consequences.

The excessive pumping of water by the use of technology not only did harm in Pakistan’s countryside, it also had negative consequences in the urban areas. By adopting what is essentially an ad hoc approach to meeting the rapidly increasing need for water by the people living in the large cities, governments in various parts of the country may have addressed the immediate problem but they also brought long-term headaches.

The situation in Lahore illustrates this well. Large tubewells were sunk by the authorities in the city to meet the demand for water. These wells lowered the water table to the extent that there is some danger that large sink holes may appear in the city if ameliorative action is not taken.

The problem of water scarcity, therefore, needs to be dealt with comprehensively, not just by the use of technology. What are the various instruments of public policy available to address the issue in a way that in solving one problem new ones don’t get created? I will take up this question in the next article on water in this space.

Source:http://www.dawn.com/2007/04/10/op.htm#1