Failure of Domestic Policies Continues to Deepen Pakistan’s Water Crisis

Pakistan’s water emergency is real. But the cause is not as simple as the one Islamabad keeps repeating. Since India placed the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance in April 2025 after the Pahalgam terrorist attack, Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership has presented the move as an assault on the country’s national lifeline. The concern is not imaginary. The Indus Waters Treaty, brokered by the World Bank in 1960, has for more than six decades governed the sharing of the Indus river system between India and Pakistan. Under the treaty, the western rivers, the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab, were allocated largely for Pakistan’s use, while the eastern rivers, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, were allocated to India. For Pakistan, the treaty is deeply tied to agriculture, food security, hydropower and national survival. According to Reuters, roughly 80 percent of Pakistan’s agriculture depends on the river system governed by the treaty. That explains why India’s move created alarm in Islamabad and panic among farmers. But alarm is not the same as analysis. The suspension of the treaty may be a serious diplomatic escalation, but it is not the original cause of Pakistan’s water crisis. Pakistan’s rivers are not running short only because of an upstream neighbour. They are running short because the Pakistani state has spent decades failing to store the water it already controls, failing to modernise its irrigation system, failing to protect the Indus delta, and failing to distribute scarcity fairly among its own provinces. India’s move has given Islamabad a powerful external alibi. The deeper crisis, however, remains domestic. The Hague-based Clingendael Institute described India’s April 2025 move as a “pause of cooperation, not an end,” and noted that the suspension followed the Pahalgam attack and was framed by New Delhi in national-security terms. Other analysts have also pointed out that India does not have the immediate infrastructure to fully stop or divert the western rivers. In other words, the move is serious, but its short-term hydrological effect is limited. It is more a strategic signal than an instant cutoff. Pakistan’s leadership has nevertheless intensified a narrative that seeks to place the country’s wider water distress at India’s door. That narrative is politically useful because it rallies the public around an external threat. It also allows the state to avoid harder questions about decades of mismanagement, weak storage, provincial mistrust, canal losses, groundwater depletion, floodplain neglect and poor crop planning. The real story begins with storage that was never built. Pakistan receives large seasonal river flows, but its storage capacity remains dangerously low. Policy discussions inside Pakistan have repeatedly noted that the country can store water for only about 30 days, far below the 120-day benchmark often cited in national planning debates. The country’s main reservoirs, Tarbela, Mangla and Chashma, provide limited live storage, and their capacity continues to be reduced by sedimentation. Tarbela, completed in the 1970s, was the last truly large reservoir Pakistan brought into service. This is not a natural disaster. It is a political record. Pakistan has debated new dams for decades, including Kalabagh, but successive governments have failed to build the provincial consensus required to proceed. The result is a country that complains of shortage while letting enormous volumes of floodwater escape in wet years and then facing acute scarcity in dry months. The World Bank has warned that poor water management costs Pakistan heavily. In a 2019 assessment, the World Bank said poor water management was conservatively estimated to cost Pakistan around 4 percent of GDP, or about $12 billion annually. The same assessment noted that irrigation dominates water use in the country, while four major crops, rice, wheat, sugarcane and cotton, consume around 80 percent of water but contribute only a small share of GDP. That is the heart of the crisis. Pakistan does not only lack water. It wastes water. Its irrigation system is one of the largest in the world, but it remains inefficient, politically protected and slow to reform. Flood irrigation, leaky canals, weak pricing, poor crop choices and groundwater overuse have all turned scarcity into a permanent national condition. Per capita water availability tells the same story. According to water-sector estimates cited by Dawn and other Pakistani outlets, Pakistan’s annual per capita water availability has fallen from more than 5,000 cubic metres in the early years after independence to below 1,000 cubic metres today, a level widely associated with water scarcity. This collapse has been driven by population growth, inefficient use and poor governance. India did not create that long decline. Pakistani policymakers allowed it. The Indus delta shows the damage most clearly. The delta once depended on large seasonal flows to push back the Arabian Sea and sustain agriculture, fisheries and mangrove ecosystems. Today, reduced freshwater flows below Kotri Barrage have allowed seawater intrusion to advance into Sindh’s coastal belt. Farmland has been damaged, drinking water has turned saline in many areas, and communities that once lived from the river now live with the river’s disappearance. Sindh has repeatedly argued that insufficient flows below Kotri have devastated the delta. Environmental reporting and Pakistani experts have warned that the Indus delta, once one of the region’s most important ecosystems, is now shrinking under the combined pressure of upstream diversions, low freshwater flow, climate stress and sea intrusion. For many in Sindh, this is not an abstract environmental issue. It is a question of land, livelihood and provincial survival. What little water Pakistan stores and distributes is also politically contested. Under the 1991 Water Apportionment Accord, the Indus River System Authority is supposed to regulate water distribution among the provinces. In theory, the accord created a national framework. In practice, it did not end mistrust. The lower riparian provinces, especially Sindh, have long argued that shortages are not shared fairly and that Punjab, the upstream and politically dominant province, remains protected. That grievance has deepened over the years. Pakistani analysts and Sindhi political leaders have repeatedly accused IRSA and the federal government of applying cuts unevenly. Reports citing provincial complaints have stated that Sindh has faced heavier shortages than Punjab in several dry periods. Sindh officials have also objected to releases into link canals that feed Punjab’s agricultural command areas at times when Sindh itself reports shortages downstream. This is where Pakistan’s water crisis becomes a federal crisis. In Punjab, water is often discussed as an input for agricultural growth. In Sindh, it is increasingly discussed as a question of rights. A lower riparian province cannot be expected to trust the system when it believes that every shortage is passed downward and every development project is pushed from above. Nothing has exposed this mistrust more sharply than the Green Pakistan Initiative and the proposed canal schemes associated with it. Launched in 2023 with the backing of Pakistan’s powerful military leadership and the federal government, the Green Pakistan Initiative has been presented as a food-security and corporate-farming programme. Al Jazeera reported in March 2025 that the project involved a network of six canals and aimed to irrigate millions of acres of barren land as part of a programme worth about $3.3 billion. The initiative was launched with the involvement of Pakistan’s army chief, General Asim Munir, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. In Sindh, however, the project was not seen as a neutral development scheme. It was seen as another attempt to redirect the Indus system in favour of Punjab. The proposed Cholistan canal became the centre of the controversy. Sindh’s political parties, lawyers, farmers, writers and civil-society groups warned that any new canal from the Indus would deepen downstream scarcity and further weaken the delta. The Sindh Assembly passed a resolution against the canal projects in March 2025. Protests spread across the province. Demonstrators blocked highways and major routes, including the Babarloi bypass, accusing the federal government and Punjab of trying to impose a decision without provincial consent. By late April 2025, the federal government was forced to step back and acknowledge that the canal plan could not move forward without consensus among the provinces. For Sindhi critics, the project looked like Kalabagh Dam under another name. It was presented in the language of national development, food security and agricultural modernisation. But downstream, it was heard as another promise that Punjab would gain and Sindh would lose. The problem was not only technical. It was historical. Sindh has heard similar assurances before. The military’s role makes the controversy even more sensitive. Pakistan’s army has long been more than a security institution. It is a political and economic actor with influence over development, land, infrastructure and national decision-making. Reuters reported in 2025 that Asim Munir was promoted to the rank of field marshal, further strengthening his position at the centre of Pakistan’s power structure. When a military-backed agricultural programme seeks to reshape water use in an already contested river system, downstream provinces are unlikely to see it as ordinary development. They see power. They see land, water and authority moving in the same direction: toward Punjab and toward the military establishment. The cost of this mismanagement arrives in two forms: flood and drought. These are not opposites in Pakistan. They are two symptoms of the same failure to regulate a violent, seasonal and climate-stressed river system. With too little storage, heavy monsoon flows become catastrophe. With too little conservation, the dry season becomes scarcity. The same country that drowns in August can parch by April. The 2022 floods exposed the scale of the failure. According to a joint assessment by the Government of Pakistan, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Union and the United Nations, the floods caused more than $14.9 billion in damages and about $15.2 billion in economic losses, with reconstruction needs exceeding $16 billion. The assessment said 33 million people were affected. Pakistan’s Planning Commission also reported that more than 1,730 people were killed and more than 8 million displaced. Climate change made those floods more intense. But governance shaped their human cost. Floodplains had been poorly regulated, drainage systems were weak, and vulnerable communities were left exposed. Sindh, already the lower riparian victim of reduced flows in dry years, became one of the worst victims of excess water in the flood year. The province was battered first by water scarcity and then by catastrophic inundation. This is not only a humanitarian failure. It is an economic failure. Agriculture remains central to Pakistan’s economy. According to Pakistan’s Economic Survey, agriculture contributes around a quarter of national output and employs more than a third of the workforce. It also supports export earnings through crops and textiles. When water governance fails, the damage spreads from farms to food prices, from exports to employment, and from provincial politics to national stability. Pakistan has already paid the price through food insecurity and imports. In recent years, the country has spent heavily to import wheat and other food items while its own agricultural regions have struggled with water shortages, floods, high input costs and policy confusion. A country built around the Indus basin should not be trapped between flooded fields and empty granaries. This is why the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty is so useful to those who rule Pakistan. It moves blame across the border. It allows leaders to speak of national survival without admitting domestic failure. It turns water into a patriotic slogan rather than a governance question. It asks citizens to fear India while avoiding the more uncomfortable truth that Pakistan’s own institutions have wasted, misallocated and politicised the river system for decades. None of this means India’s action is harmless. The suspension of the treaty is dangerous, destabilising and legally contested. Water should not be turned into a weapon between two nuclear-armed states. Pakistan has legitimate concerns about the long-term consequences if the treaty framework collapses. But legitimate concern about India does not erase Pakistan’s domestic failures. The anger rising in Sindh and Balochistan is not directed only at India. It is directed at a Punjab-centred, military-managed water order that many citizens believe has treated downstream provinces as an afterthought. It is directed at a state that failed to build storage by consensus, failed to share shortages fairly, failed to protect the delta, and now asks the same neglected provinces to trust new canal schemes promoted from above. Pakistan cannot secure its water future through speeches about the Indus Waters Treaty alone. It needs transparent water accounting. It needs storage built through political consensus, not coercion. It needs modern irrigation, realistic crop planning, groundwater regulation, protection of the Indus delta and a fairer federal water compact. It also needs to end the habit of using India as an explanation for every crisis that Pakistani governance has helped create. Until Pakistan builds water storage responsibly and shares water fairly, no amount of blame poured across the frontier will keep its fields green or its federation stable. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Khaama Press. The post Failure of Domestic Policies Continues to Deepen Pakistan’s Water Crisis appeared first on Khaama Press.