Pakistan’s Irrigation System is Dying, the Indus Treaty’s Demise just Buried it
By Fazeel Asif.
For 65 years, the Indus Waters Treaty was the one thing that worked between Pakistan and India. Last April, India suspended it. One year on, the treaty is gone. The Court of Arbitration has ruled the suspension illegal. India has called the court illegal. The legal certainty Pakistan’s water planners relied upon has evaporated.
And beneath that shock, a slower death has been underway for decades.
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Pakistan operates one of the largest irrigation networks on Earth: three major reservoirs, 19 barrages, 60,000 kilometers of canals. It supplies 90 percent of national food production. It was built in the 1960s and 1970s for 70 million people. Today, Pakistan exceeds 240 million. Per capita water availability has fallen from over 5,000 cubic meters to about 1,000, the internationally recognized scarcity line. Live storage covers only 30 days of river flow. Sedimentation has eaten 30 percent of reservoir capacity.
The shortage is real. The bigger problem is what we do with the water we have.
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What water actually costs
Take a farmer with a five-acre holding in a tail-end village near Rahim Yar Khan. The canal reaches him once a fortnight, if that. He pumps groundwater. For one acre of wheat, he needs five irrigations. Diesel at Rs290(old rates) per liter costs him about Rs3,000 per irrigation. That is Rs15,000 per acre per season for wheat.
His neighbor near the canal head, who gets reliable supply, pays the government’s new abiana rate: Rs400 per acre for the entire year.
Same crop. Same district. One pays thirty-seven times more. The poorest farmers, those at the geographic and political margins of the canal system, pay the most for water and deplete the aquifer in the process. The largest farmers pay the least and get the most.
For rice and sugarcane, the gap widens further. Canal users pay Rs2,000 and Rs1,600 per acre per year. A tail-end farmer pumping diesel for rice, which requires fifteen to twenty-five flood irrigations, pays over Rs45,000 per acre. Sugar mill owners lobby against crop reform. Politicians in canal-fed constituencies protect fee schedules their voters expect. Cropping patterns follow procurement support, not hydrology. Sugarcane and rice expand in semi-arid zones where rainfall cannot justify them.
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Groundwater: the silent collapse
Pakistan now has over a million private tube wells. Groundwater supplies more than half of Punjab’s irrigation. In central Punjab, water tables are falling by more than half a meter per year. In parts of Sindh, freshwater lenses are shrinking, and salinity rises in their place.
There is no volumetric metering of groundwater. No functioning licensing regime. No pricing signal connected to depletion. Solar pumps, which Punjab is subsidizing at 67 to 80 percent, further reduce the marginal cost of extraction. The system is delivering less reliable surface water to fewer fields while drawing down aquifers in parallel.
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Institutions that cannot manage
Responsibility is a joke. IRSA allocates river flows but has no leverage over farm efficiency. WAPDA builds dams but does not govern groundwater. Provincial irrigation departments distribute canal water without financial autonomy or serious monitoring. No institution holds the whole balance.
Punjab passed a Water Act in 2019. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2020. Both provide frameworks for groundwater regulation. Both sit unimplemented. Pakistan does not lack water laws. It lacks the will to enforce them.
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What reform requires, ranked
The fixes are not mysterious. Here is what one year of real action would look like.
First, groundwater metering in one district within 12 months. The Punjab Water Act already authorizes this. Pick a district in central Punjab where tables are falling fastest. Install volumetric meters on all new tube wells. Make depletion visible. The question is not technical. It is whether any government will discipline its own electoral base.
Second, abiana reform with a smallholder shield. Raising rates without improving distribution reliability is political suicide. But a two-tier system that protects farmers under 12.5 acres while charging commercial users a scarcity price is possible. It requires honesty about who benefits from the current arrangement.
Third, crop incentives that follow hydrology. This does not mean banning sugarcane. It means withdrawing the price supports and procurement guarantees that make it economically rational in water-stressed zones.
Fourth, storage, but only as a complement. More water flowing into a system that wastes half postpones the problem.
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The external shock changes everything
The treaty’s suspension is not a replacement for internal reform. It is a multiplier. Data sharing has lapsed. Water was operationally weaponized during the May 2025 standoff. India is accelerating the Shahpur Kandi barrage to maximize diversion of the eastern rivers. Pakistan escalated to the UN Security Council in April 2026. The Council has not acted.
For 65 years, Pakistani water planners could assume a floor beneath their feet. That floor is gone. The crisis will not arrive with a single headline. It will unfold canal by canal, well by well, as it already is.
The system is not dying of thirst. It is dying of avoidance.
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By Fazeel Asif, who can be reached at fazeel63@gmail.com
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