Water problem

While it is true that Pakistan overall is increasingly coming under extreme water strain, the situation in Balochistan is much more critical in comparison. A report submitted before the Senate by the Ministry of Water and Power has confirmed that Balochistan is facing a groundwater shortage of potentially catastrophic proportions. The report identifies excessive groundwater utilisation to cater to the province’s increasing population as the cause, but it would be unwise to ignore the role of over 4,000 agricultural tube-wells and the water-intensive mining industry cropping up throughout the province. The blame is shifted onto the provincial and federal governments for ignoring the crisis. With groundwater management now a provincial subject, the federal ministry has itself taken the easy step of blaming the Balochistan government, but anyone aware of the long meddling of the federal government in most aspects of Balochistan would find it hard not to hold federal authorities also complicit in the decreasing water supply in the province. Balochistan certainly faces much more extreme weather, but the depletion of groundwater resources have little to do with the climate and much more to do with the scale of water consumption throughout the province.
The report confirms that groundwater is being overused in 10 out of 19 sub-basins while groundwater usage exceeds recharge by 22 percent. The government’s proposed intervention is to build recharge reservoirs, a strategy that has been in place since the 1970s. These ‘delayed action dams’ aim at intercepting flood water at catchment areas to recharge ground water. The strategy has had mixed results in terms of raising the water table despite the fact that another 36 such dams are in the process. Small dams are also proposed as another part of the water solution for Balochistan, including the Mangi Dam which is planned to provide water to Quetta. Another aspect of Balochistan that has been ignored is the

indigenous water management system, Karez, which operates by linking underground channels to bring ground water to the surface. This system provided a sustainable mechanism for maintaining the province’s population unlike the intensive water chugging methods required by modern agriculture and mining. The Karez system has almost been dried up by the low groundwater levels and real fears exists that water could run out in the province within the decade. The situation requires a creative solution in line with the adoption of more environmentally sustainable forms of development for the province. A solution only focused on building more dams is unlikely to solve Balochistan’s water problems in the long-term.