Why we're short on water

After years of drought, the 2025 monsoon brought abundance. Pakistan's reservoirs were full. Tarbela, Mangla and Chashma were filled close to capacity at the beginning of Kharif.

Yet the Indus River System Authority announced an 8% shortage for the Rabi season. The contradiction, full reservoirs and yet shortages, reveals Pakistan's real water crisis. The problem is not scarcity but mismanagement. This is a crisis of governance, not of hydrology, and it stems from the unfulfilled promise of the 1991 Water Apportionment Accord.

When the four provincial chief ministers signed the accord 34 years ago, they were designing a national strategy for water security. The document established a framework for managing the Indus Basin through six linked principles: fair allocations, surplus sharing, storage development, ecological protection, provincial autonomy, and operational discipline. The framers understood that while rivers would rise and fall, institutions could bring stability through predictable rules and shared responsibility.

Clause 2 fixed provincial shares. Clause 4 set rules for sharing surplus water. Clause 6 required new reservoirs. Clause 7 recognised the importance of environmental flows to protect Sindh's delta. Clauses 8–12 gave provinces freedom to develop their own water resources. And Clause 14(c) made irrigation the highest operational priority, stating that "the existing reservoirs would be operated with priority for the irrigation uses of the provinces”. Food had to come before power generation.

But over the years, only Clause 2, the allocation table, has remained in focus, often the cause of inter-provincial friction. The rest are ignored. No major reservoirs have been built since Tarbela, and total storage capacity has fallen from about 20 maf (million acre-feet) to about 13.5 maf. Without additional storage, surplus floodwater cannot be captured or shared. Clause 4, meant to distribute abundance, lies dormant.

Clause 7's commitment to the delta has been disregarded. Flows below Kotri have declined from about 50 maf in the late twentieth century to less than 20 maf today, and that too mainly in Kharif. For most of Rabi, the Indus below Kotri runs dry. Saltwater invades mangroves and farmland, displacing fishing communities and turning one of South Asia's richest ecosystems into a wasteland.

Clause 14(c), the guarantee of irrigation priority, has fared no better. Tarbela's tunnels and outlets are run largely on hydropower schedules. With major works on tunnels, the dam's full capacity cannot be released even when full. In 2024-25, constraints on Tarbela's low-level outlets limited IRSA's access to deep storage. Last year, similar operational constraints helped turn a projected 16%-18% shortage into sharper impacts than headline numbers suggested, a pattern that threatens to repeat. Reservoirs brim while farmers at the canal tail ends wait for water. This directly violates the Accord's intent. When irrigation priority is reversed, food security is put at risk.

An 8% shortfall in Rabi may seem small, but its consequences are serious. Wheat, grown in this season, feeds 250 million Pakistanis. A shortfall in irrigation at sowing time means lower yields, higher prices, and tighter food supplies months later. The system is technically capable of avoiding this outcome but is not governed to do so. Full dams have become symbols of abundance that conceal management failure.

Pakistan does not suffer from a lack of water. It suffers from poor governance and too little implementation. The 1991 Accord provided a comprehensive framework that, if followed, would have balanced competing needs and reduced the cycle of floods and droughts. The accord gave provinces significant autonomy: Punjab and KP could build small dams under 5,000 acres without federal approval; Balochistan could develop right-bank independently; provinces could modernise canal networks with lined channels and precision irrigation to stretch their allocations further.

Yet this freedom has gone largely unused. Provincial governments have focused on demanding more water from the system rather than developing what they're already entitled to develop independently. None of these mechanisms was activated together. The system was reduced to allocations on paper without the development architecture that made those allocations viable.

The pattern repeats every year. Monsoon floods fill the dams, but much of the water flows unused to the sea. By winter, inflows drop and the system announces shortages. Each cycle deepens provincial mistrust and erodes confidence in federal coordination. The accord was meant to prevent this by institutionalising cooperation rather than crisis management. It offered a path from ‘not enough water’ to ‘not enough governance’. And governance can be fixed.

Implementing the accord's spirit now requires political will more than engineering skill. The framework already exists. What is needed is compliance. The Council of Common Interests should reaffirm irrigation priority under Clause 14(c) and empower IRSA with operational oversight over Wapda's reservoir releases, ending the disconnect between allocation authority and operational control.

Federal and provincial governments must accelerate storage projects to recover capacity lost to siltation. Ecological flows downstream of Kotri should be restored. Provincial irrigation departments must invest in small dams, canal modernisation and efficient irrigation within their allocations. Real-time data on inflows and releases should be made public so transparency replaces suspicion.

This year's monsoons have given Pakistan an opportunity. Nature has done its part by filling the reservoirs. The question is whether governance will do its own. If the accord is treated as a living framework rather than a relic, this Rabi season could mark a turning point. Three decades of experience have shown that Pakistan's challenge is not how much water flows through its rivers but how it is managed. The accord endures because it was built on consensus. That same consensus must now be used to implement it.

If Pakistan operationalises the accord as designed, this year of floods could become the foundation for long-term stability. If not, full reservoirs will again yield empty canals, and the country will learn once more that its true shortage is not of water but of governance.

The writer is a former Punjab minister for irrigation and finance, with extensive experience in Pakistan’s provincial and federal legislatures.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this piece are the writer's own and don't necessarily reflect Geo.tv's editorial policy.

Originally published in The News