Water Security: Post # 19

How to achieve water security

Water security has been defined by Wikipedia as “the reliable availability of an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods and production, coupled with an acceptable level of water-related risks.”

Do we have reliable availability of water in Pakistan? This question has both regional and local dimensions. In a country where 75 per cent water share originates from foreign lands and the same amount of renewable water is already being used, nothing can be said with confidence about the future reliability of water in terms of acceptable quantity and quality required.In an article published in Dawn on December 3, Ashfak Bokhari has written about our collective failure to defend our riparian water rights. This conclusion is drawn by presenting India’s well-documented and consistent efforts to build as many dams as possible along three western rivers allocated to Pakistan.

There’s no doubt that a special provision in the Indus Basin Treaty of 1960 allows India to build run-of-the-river dams to generate electricity but within specified storage limits along each tributary to the main rivers. However, the same term, the run-of-the-river, also means that India must not influence the quantity of water flowing in time.

As India continues to build dozens of such dams, without even informing Pakistan in most cases, the capacity being developed to influence the stated principle will jeopardize the water security of the lower riparian state of Pakistan.

Along with India, we should also share the blame regarding the unreliable water availability in time for the users. Our river flows are highly skewed on seasonal basis.
From summer to winter, our river flows amount to approximately 85 to 15 per cent, respectively. Before blaming outsiders, we should question ourselves: Did we do enough to make these most uneven river flows even to address the emerging crisis about the water security in the country? Obviously, we have failed.

Our provincial irrigation departments have also messed up water availability on a spatial basis. In 1984-85, a CSU team conducted flow measurements along four secondary canals, one in each province, for many months using data-loggers. Data shows that every referred canal was drawing more than its due designed discharge — about 50 to 120 per cent. However, all canals had their tail sections — 25 to 40 per cent — dry when required, while fully flooded when there was rainfall in the area. .

Do we have acceptable quantity and quality of water for health purposes? To be fair, serious efforts have been made in this context, but a lot more is still needed.

Most of the densely populated area of Punjab that was served by the Sutlej and Ravi rivers has brackish groundwater that is not fit for drinking or irrigation. Moreover, large cities in the upper sections of these rivers keep pouring almost all their untreated sewerage and industrial waste-water into these dry rivers. This practice has a devastating impact on health, livelihood and environment on downstream side of the two stated rivers.

Some case studies conducted by International Water Management Institute reveal an alarming increase of water born diseases in Bahawalnagar area. This is happening because of polluted water being used for drinking as well as for uses like washing clothes, taking shower, sanitation, etc. In case of living rivers, this pollution gets diluted but it still does not eliminate serious health concerns.

Generally, it is true for all contexts, but for the arid and semi-arid countries in particular, water security is a huge risk factor for food security. What does this unreliability of water availability mean in the context of food security? Globally, about 70 per cent water is consumed in agriculture sector but in an arid or semi-arid country like Pakistan, 90 to 97 per cent water is reported to be consumed in meeting crop-water requirements.

Since unreliable water availability creates a rain-fed scenario, it becomes a serious risk factor for food security by not availing the full potential of irrigated agriculture.
This is why a water security crisis is really termed as food security crisis in developing countries where local agricultural production supports food needs of the entire population.

In 1996, the National Defense College of India defined national security as “— (It) is an appropriate and aggressive blend of political resilience and maturity, human resources, economic structure and capacity, technological competence, industrial base and availability of natural resources and finally, the military might.” Obviously, with the mention of natural resources in the stated definition, water security is made part of national security.

However, in the context of Pakistan, water insecurity becomes even a serious threat to the national security where we need guaranteed control over water resources to keep the defense lines functional on our eastern borders based on a system of canals and rivers.

Letting control of water slip away even for a month or just for few days can have serious consequences for the country.

Whether it is a challenge of food or national security, the importance of water security can only be overlooked by risking perilous consequences. In reality, the crisis relating to water security is essentially an outcome of an absolute absence of political will and poor water governance at different levels of water supply system.

In a hostile environment, an upper riparian may take advantage of its position, but who can stop lower riparian to counter such tactics by taking proactive actions at right time instead getting embroiled in a futile blame game?

For example, we can easily frustrate most of the manipulations of the upper riparian states aimed at affecting the run-of-the-river flows through appropriate proactive actions like building reservoirs and / water banks on the lower riparian side. The same logic can be extended to the national as well as provincial levels. However, there is tendency to hide in-actions, incompetence and poverty of innovative solutions behind a victim’s syndrome.

The problems of water governance in Pakistan have multiplied over the years because ‘the agents’ have managed to become ‘the owners’, disabling internal checks and balances embedded through laws and the constitution to prevent ‘the agents’ from misusing powers and resources of ‘the actual owners/water users’ — the people.

Since there is a lack of knowledge about the state of water governance at different levels, the ‘agents’ are either incapable or become negligent. In an environment of disabled checks and balances, coupled with greed and self-interests, the agents fail to defend the rights of lower riparian at the international level and to ensure Pakistan’s water security.

For effective water security governance, the starting point is to establish centers of excellence or institutes for water security policy and research to generate authentic body of information for taking proactive actions to safeguard the rights of stakeholders.

At present, our reluctance to take effective counter measures needs to be replaced by hard facts instead of ongoing political rhetoric. There is no alternative to a body of highly competent professionals and researchers to produce documents on hard realities and different options to address such challenges. By behaving like an ostrich, how long can we afford to keep hurting our own interests? (Article published in the Dawn of 17th December 2012)

A New Concept of Water Banks to avert Water Crisis in Pakistan-- Post # 18

Non-traditional Concept of Water Banks 

To understand the concept of water banks, we need to understand the difference between the concept of an irrigation management practice that is determined on scientific principles or inferred by the on-ground and historic practices. George H. Hargreaves and Gary P. Merkley in their recent book explain: “Irrigation management consists of determining when to irrigate, the amount to apply at each irrigation and during each stage of plant growth, and operation and maintenance of irrigation system.” 

However, our on-ground “irrigation management” practices hardly assist in deciding about the time, the amount of irrigation water (quality and quantity) to apply at each stage of crop growth for operating and maintaining an irrigation system. At present, with or without a crop planted, the irrigation management is conceived to be a system of weekly river water disposal or rationing on equitable basis according to land owned but unreliable as well as mostly inequitable distribution in terms of quantity and quality of water. Obviously, the system is too rigid to adjust to the stochastic demand for irrigation water.  

As against canal water, the groundwater pumped comes close to meeting the actual purpose of irrigation as defined by Hargreaves and Merkley. Within the available know how and experiences of farmers, tube-wells are only operated at a time and for certain duration to meet crop water requirements. Because of this flexibility and control, farmers are willing to pay an amount for 15 minutes of relatively inferior quality pumped water that is more than what the farmers pay even after an entire irrigation season per acre for a better quality canal supply.

Along with many other socio-political reasons, one important factor for the pumping of an expensive and relatively inferior quality of groundwater is the rigidity, unreliability and inadequacy in the delivery of surface water at the field level. If a rigid water delivery system served the purpose to keep famines at bay by having just subsistence agriculture during the nineteenth century, a flexible system is the demand of the twenty-first century to re-engineer an irrigation supply system that is more reliable, adequate and equitably accessible.

In the above stated context, to re-engineer our irrigation water delivery system, a new concept of water banks is being proposed. For better understanding, it is appropriate to consider a traditional concept of a bank as we are all familiar with. Oxford Dictionary defines a bank as "an establishment for custody of money, which it pays out on customer's order." In our context of water banks, this description can be tailored as “an establishment for the custody of irrigation water, which it delivers as per users’ orders.” 

Since the money belongs to individuals and irrigation water belongs to a shared or common pool to be apportioned according to already established water-use rights, the nature of establishment will change from private and public enterprises to entities or organizations that are managed by the stakeholders. Obviously, primary stakeholders are going to be irrigation water users whereas the relevant provincial officials will play supporting role in the distribution and application of irrigation water.

In the nineteenth century, there was no legal and organizational infrastructure available in the Indus Basin to let the stakeholders manage a common pool commodity like groundwater or river water to be used in the irrigated sector. As a consequence, the public entities found it convenient to have water rationed, rather disposed of, within canal commands on time-based equality as per unit area owned. Of course, the canal outlets could have ensured equitable water distribution, in terms of quantity of water, but so many socio-economic and political factors frustrated even an equitable water disposal on the fields.

With an unstoppable process of development and an exponential population growth have pushed the farmers to move from subsistence to a commercial agriculture. As a consequence, the defacto water distribution practice of an on-field disposal has to change by delivering proper quantity and quality of water for crops as and when required. In effect, this vision of irrigation water delivery is a paradigm shift from a rationing system to an irrigation management system. Because of the nature of commodity being a shared or common asset, its management is extremely difficult business without a meaningful involvement of all stakeholders to manage it.

Fortunately, in Pakistan, we are lucky to have all required legal and organizational infrastructure in place to let the stakeholders to run these water banks at different levels of an irrigation system.  Under the Acts (1997) of the Provincial Irrigation and Drainage Authorities (PIDAs), we can have Water Users’ Associations (WUAs) on water-courses, Farmers’ Organizations (FOs) on secondary distributary canals, Area Water Boards (AWB) at branch / main canals and Board of Directors (BoD) at provincial levels to ensure irrigation management by the water users.

This concept of water banks envisions on-time and adequate irrigation water delivery by constructing and managing storage facilities for any combination of river water (as per the Accord of 1991); groundwater, floodwater, treated wastewater and rainwater; depending upon the availability; along each provincial irrigation system at different levels from private farm to the provincial level.  In short, to manage the acute water crisis on hand in the country, each province will have to develop water banks at all different levels of respective irrigation system and managed by its stakeholders with obligatory support by the relevant public entities.  

Groundwater Governance & Management in Pakistan-9: Post # 17

I.  What should be potential policy points for Pakistan's consideration regarding groundwater governance and management?

In a pursuit of groundwater policy aimed at improving groundwater governance and management, we must acknowledge physical, political, social, economic and environmental conditions as they exist from point to point and community to community. We should be bold enough to confess that our governance system at any level is susceptible to a rent-seeking behavior as an established rule instead of being an exception. So, trying to handover groundwater governance and management to the official and unofficial rent-seekers would be a recipe for making things worse than the ones that we strived to correct. In physical sense, groundwater abstraction and quality concerns are first and foremost community matters and need to build support systems around such reality on ground. With this kind of brief precautionary note, the following potential policy points are listed below for improving groundwater governance and management:

•  Foremost there should be a groundwater management entity established in public sector at each provincial level to collect, document and keep updating all the required information for making knowledge based management decisions and to ensure good groundwater governance (to avoid burdening the public exchequer, the existing on-farm water management and soil fertility directorates can be assigned such mandate);
•  Based on the above stated groundwater related information and measures opted by the local groundwater governance committees (reported below), local as well as provincial governments should pass legislation / regulations regarding responsible groundwater abstractions and quality controls;
• Comprising of elected representatives at village /  Union Council level (village level when Pakistan puts its local government plan in operation at village level) local committees be formally made responsible to regulate quantity and quality of groundwater abstraction as per legislation / regulations passed by provincial assemblies and district councils and supported by the proposed public entity;
• On technical side. the proposed new public entity for groundwater management should assist these local groundwater governance committees for striving to improve groundwater governance and management; 
• Coordination groundwater governance committees of elected representative should also be considered at tehsil, district and provincial level (A potential schematic organizational structure proposed below) to address groundwater related concerns and to enforce measures for effective groundwater governance and management; and
• Instead of going for too complicated package of groundwater governance and management, our opinion is that we should initiate a process by proposing some arrangements to start with. With time, we should learn more about things that work and those requiring treatment or surgery in the given context. Main point to consider is that it is the initiation of this process that is more important to evolve a bottom-up, home-grown model of groundwater governance and management without too much spending public human and financial resources (building on what already exists).

Groundwater Governance & Management in Pakistan-8: Post #16

H.  What should be main features of a model for groundwater governance in Pakistan?

Groundwater governance can have the following four components: (1) Economic aspect to secure efficient use; (2) social aspect to ensure equal democratic opportunities through meaningful participation of groundwater users in decision making; (3) Political aspect for assuring equitable use; and (4) environmental aspect to firm up sustainable use of groundwater resource. 

An expert team of DFID has stated that groundwater governance is focused on the exercise of appropriate authority and promotion of responsible collective action to ensure sustainable and efficient utilization of groundwater resources for the benefit of humankind and dependent ecosystems. Do we have any example where appropriate authority have been exercised and / efforts have been made for a responsible collective action for managing groundwater resources? Answer to such a question is simply a big "NO".

               

Since crisis of groundwater management is, in reality, crisis of groundwater governance; our focus should be to address root-cause of the problem instead of symbolic or real outcomes only.  A common sense statement that groundwater governance determines who gets what quantity of groundwater, when and how, and decides who has the right to groundwater and related services. The groundwater governance comprises of set of policies and decisions that are derived through institutional, formal and informal, arrangements put in place along with legislation and regulations that define roles, rules, rights and responsibilities of all stakeholders regarding the ownership, administration and management of groundwater resources.

When groundwater management is conceived to be the set of actions to implement decisions that derive from the process of governance; our predicament becomes obvious as we don’t have even rudimentary elements of groundwater governance what to speak of effective groundwater governance. This is why crisis of groundwater management become crisis of groundwater governance.

                                                                                                                  

Before proposing some important components of effective governance, symptoms of ineffective governance can be listed as under:

• Absence or lack of groundwater institutions and regulations;
• Undefined groundwater property or use rights;
• Lack of institutional or legal support for an efficient groundwater use;
• Hardly any arrangement in place to ensure sustainable abstraction of groundwater;
• Missing political will to shoulder responsible groundwater abstractions;
• No entity representing and ensuring equal democratic opportunities for overseeing groundwater  abstraction and quality control;
• Lack of social concern for equitable access to groundwater resource;
• Lack of clarification about roles, rules, rights and responsibilities of all stakeholders like local, provincial and federal agencies, private sector, civil society regarding administration, ownership and management of groundwater resource; and
• No systematic data collection and information availability about groundwater abstraction points, their location, point to point intervals, quality status with aquifer depth from say village to village, criteria for groundwater quality for abstraction, proximity from brackish groundwater zone, operational hours required to avoid rising of fresh-saline water interface vertically as well as horizontally, sizes of pumps installed, etc.

Groundwater Governance & Management in Pakistan-7: Post # 15

G. what are the policy instruments and institutional features of groundwater governance?

A website by Oxbridge Writers (http://www.oxbridgewriters.com/essays/estate-management/governance-issues-in-managing-groundwater-use.php) has listed policy instruments and institutional features about groundwater governance. The same points are reproduced here to visualize the existing conditions of groundwater governance in different parts of Pakistan:

1. Policy Instruments: There are three main policy instruments: (a) Regulatory; (b) Economic and (c) voluntary / advisory. Policies may make use of more than one instrument but separate categories are only to define nature of each instrument as stated below:

a.       Regulatory Policy Instruments: This category includes instruments like regulations, dug-well listing, tube-well listing, and user right allocation. We have an estimated 1.2 million tube-wells and thousands of dug-wells. Obviously, for such a huge number of groundwater pumping/ lifting units, a top-down groundwater management and monitoring is expected to be difficult and costly affair. In the absence of regulations and listing, the current practice appears to be just cooked data as each year there is constant number, like 20,000 tube-wells per year, keeps getting added. Had there been some regulations put in place for getting access to aquifer, there would have been authentic enough data available to plan for improving groundwater management.

b.      Economic Policy Instruments: These instruments comprise of financial incentives or disincentives like tax, subsidy, and charge for pumping groundwater or allowance for controlling pollution by treating wastewater. In Pakistan, groundwater resource is considered such a special common pool of natural resource that anybody can dig a well or install a tube-well without any permission or fear from the federal, provincial or local governments.

c.       Voluntary / Advisory Policy Instruments: These instruments do not need either coercive or monetary measures to manage groundwater as this approach is based on voluntary actions and / behavioral changes. Usually, such voluntary collective actions results by providing groundwater water related critical information on regular basis, presentation of practical experience and providing relevant information from different contexts where groundwater crisis were managed successfully by such instruments.

2.   Institutional Features relating to Groundwater Governance: 

Following are few reported institutional features of groundwater governance that have been tried in other countries. Such examples are to compare with local cases to build a model/s of groundwater governance suitable for local conditions. The following are some notable features for consideration;

a)      Role of Voluntary Compliance in Groundwater Governance: Monitoring more than one million tube-wells and thousands dug-wells scattered all around is an expensive option. In such a situation, voluntary compliance, if it is made to work, is a cost-effective modality to try. One example is provided from California where groups of groundwater users decided agenda, rule and regulations for groundwater management themselves. With monitoring groundwater management, it allowed transparent acts of each water user among respective group members. In spite of seriousness of groundwater crisis in Pakistan, there is no such involvement of users tried to formulate a shared agenda of groundwater management, rules and regulations to manage this critical natural resource effectively. In a society where compliance of laws and regulations is not that well established, letting local communities to devise their own agreed red-lines in this context is worth considering alternative.

b)      Role of Traditional Practices in Groundwater Governance: As stated by the referred source: “Most of the time, the traditional local action implementation along with modern scientific management system and techniques do have important role in groundwater governance. For instance, in Eritrea, the traditional system of sharing and protection of well water is very helpful for locals to conserve water throughout drought seasons.” In our case, there are also cases from Baluchistan, like Panjgoor and Ziarat, where people decided to prohibit groundwater pumping using tube-wells as a voluntary collective decision by local communities. As a consequence, their Karezes are still functioning whereas in other local basins of Baluchistan, non-regulated power- pumping has turned many horizontal galleries (karezes) into the relics of the past.

c)      Role of Administration in Groundwater Governance: Depending upon the nature of a particular aquifer conditions, the role of clear, reasonable and strong institutional arrangements is quite obvious for an effective implementation of the decentralized groundwater management. In doing so, however, there is need to define boundary of such arrangements in a way that unrelated stakeholders are excluded and any group of relevant stakeholders are not left out. If doing so, the referred care is not taken, effectiveness becomes doubtful. For example, in our context, tube-well and dug-well owners; the farmers who apply heavy doses of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides; urban groundwater suppliers and wastewater contributors are the most relevant stakeholders for any aquifer command. If institutional boundaries leave out such groups and / or include those who have nothing to do with the issue at hand, there is hardly any optimism for having effective groundwater governance. At this time, however, there is hardly any institutional arrangement in place for groundwater management. Perhaps it was fine to let more and more persons to go from groundwater pumping when water-logging was a common phenomenon; with groundwater mining developing in the most parts of the Indus Basin, such a vast aquifer with brackish water in the lower ends and central parts of many “doabs,” and sodic / saline-sodic groundwater in remaining almost 70% regions, Pakistan can’t afford to let the old regime of free-for-all to continue. While emphasizing the need for administrative measures, letting centralized and bureaucratic regulatory control will simply be a recipe for promoting the rent-seeking practices in critical area. What may be required is to have such potential regulations and institutional arrangements at the disposal of local communities at village or union council level to make them work.

    

d)     Role of Conflict resolution in Groundwater Governance: The existing political wrestling for surface water is good example for the things to come regarding potential conflicts over the exploitation of aquifer as common natural resource pool. Because of ethnic diversity along the Indus River System; it took much longer to settle surface water distribution among four provinces of Pakistan. In view of distrust among the referred stakeholders, an entity like Indus River System Authority (IRSA) is basically serves as an institutional arrangement for conflict resolution by letting the water distribution decision as agreed by the representatives of all provinces concerned. Of course, it is not an ideal arrangement but its role for sorting out many conflicts can’t be brushed aside. If it is not now but we can’t avoid such conflicts when water crisis deepens. More and more dependence on groundwater is bound to invite conflicts: (a) among those communities who are not very far from brackish aquifer conditions and their unbridled abstractions of groundwater will attract brackish-water intrusion sooner than later; and (b) among the same member of a same community where resourceful people will install deeper and large sized pumps (thereby depriving less resourceful users who use centrifugal shallow wells) without due consideration to the vertical movement of saline-freshwater interface upward for causing negative impact for all concerned. There is need to think of an entity to make responsible for proposing regulations and rules that each community to prolong the use of groundwater.

e)      Role of Political Economy in Groundwater Governance: In most of developing countries, like Pakistan, there have to propose legislation to regulate the ongoing haphazard and free-for-all blind groundwater abstractions. However, such suggestions or reports put social pressure on groundwater users and their political backers. In a situation where even numbers of new tube-wells installed are mostly cooked data, absence of relevant information allows special interest groups to get those regulations in place that promote rent-seeking practices to undermine a primary objective of moderating groundwater abstraction and quality controls. Moreover, in the same scenario of non-transparent information system, other stakeholders feel necessary to oppose and frustrate such efforts only to counterbalance the influence of other group instead of seeking to improve regulations for better groundwater management. In Pakistan, few years back a consultancy report was issued on groundwater management but the stated political economy of the unregulated groundwater abstraction has so powerful influence that nothing has happened in this context till today.

f)       Role of Information in Groundwater Governance: In Pakistan, there is very limited involvement of different entities in collecting scientific information on temporal as well as spatial basis. There is almost no information available about the aquifer conditions, groundwater resource and human impacts (like disposal of urban and industrial waste or use of heavy doses of fertilizers, insecticides/ pesticides and herbicides). In our local context, there is hardly any monitoring going to determine well spacing, water quality of pumped water, water quality variation from top of an aquifer to lower depths, water quality variations over time and space, operational hours or even procedure to install tube-wells. Drillers are the main actors in private sector who have a significant role to provide some relevant data but the current practice is simply to drill a well without preparing well-logs or water quality variations at a particular location. The provincial governments have only ventured in when tube-well subsidies were to be distributed in the distant past. In short, either there is no information available or whatever is available is inaccessible, uncertain and unreliable to a greater extent.

Groundwater Governance & Management in Pakistan-6: Post # 14

F. How the terms like government, groundwater governance and groundwater management are interlinked?

Groundwater governance, as explained above, process of decision making, can be differentiated from government, who decides, and groundwater management, what is done to enforce or implement groundwater related decisions as adapted from an explanation provided by the working draft of regional consultants (30^th  April 2012) on groundwater governance.  

Although outside factors like subsidy, power availability, land use, waste-water disposal, etc. do impact on the quality and quantity of water pumped/ lifted; main component of groundwater governance is about the formal and informal institutions and regulations to let this process to eliminate or minimize stress level on the sustainable groundwater quality and yield.

Groundwater Governance & Management in Pakistan-5: Post # 13

E. Governance at Different Level

1. Concept of Governance? 

United Nations Development Program (2010) defines national governance as: “It is the exercise of economic, political and administrative authority to manage a country’s affairs at all levels...it comprises the mechanisms, processes and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations and mediate their differences.

On behalf of the Global Water Partnership, Peter Rogers and Allan W. Hall (2003) elaborate this term as: “Governance covers the manner in which allocative and regulatory politics are exercised in the management of resources (natural, economic, and social) and broadly embraces the formal and informal institutions by which authority is exercised. 

John Kurien and A. K. Sinha (2007) provide different definitions in this context like: “The term governance deals with the processes and systems by which an organization or society operates. The World Bank defines governance as "the exercise of political authority and the use of institutional resources to manage society's problems and affairs". An alternative definition suggests that governance is "the use of institutions, structures of authority and even collaboration to allocate resources and coordinate or control activity in society or the economy". Thus, governance can be taken to be broadly synonymous with authority, decision making, power, administration, or politics. However, more specifically, we shall take governance to mean two broad things - Rules and Institutions / Agencies.”        

2. Water Governance?

According to the Global Water Partnership (2003): “ Water governance has been defined as the political, social, economic and administrative systems that are in place to develop and manage water resources and delivery of services at different levels of society.” Or, as described by Moench et al. (20030), water governance is the set of systems that control decision-making with regard to water resource development and management. Hence, water governance is much more about the way in which decisions are made (i.e. how, by whom, and under what conditions decisions are made) than the decisions themselves (Moench et al., 2003).  Further simplicity is provided in the second UN World Water Development Report by having a purpose-oriented definition of the water governance systems that “determine who gets what water, when and how, and decide who has the right to water and related services.”

3. Groundwater governance?

Héctor Garduño, Stephen Foster & Albert Tuinhof (2011) explain that “groundwater governance is focused on the exercise of appropriate authority and promotion of responsible collective action to ensure sustainable and efficient utilization of groundwater resources for the benefit of humankind and dependent ecosystems.”

 On behalf well-known international entities, a final draft of regional consultants (2012) about groundwater governance present the following definition:  “Groundwater governance is the process by which groundwater resources are managed through the application of responsibility, participation, information availability, transparency, custom, and rule of law. It is the art of coordinating administrative actions and decision making between and among different jurisdictional levels – one of which may be global.”

A brochure from the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Center, IGRAC, has further simplified this concept by stating that “groundwater governance is about decision-making on groundwater, involving individuals and/or organized entities at various levels. For instance, a farmer may decide to increase groundwater abstraction required for irrigation and a water authority department may decide to introduce land use restrictions for aquifer protection. Ground-water related decisions are taken in ‘action arenas’ structured by sets of nested, formal and informal rules, mechanisms and arrangements that are designed, agreed upon, applied and enforced on these various levels (www.un.igrac.org).

 Himanshu Kulkarni, ACWADAM, Pune, Email: acwadam@vsnl.net, also provides a broad defininition: “groundwater governance can be understood to have components such as augmentation (recharge), energy links, efficiency measures (micro irrigation), integration of rainwater harvesting-surface-groundwater and responses to groundwater quality deterioration.”

There is no one standard definition of groundwater governance. However, the given concepts about groundwater governance do point to formal and informal institutional arrangements in place for making decisions about groundwater management by designing, agreeing upon to apply and clarify rules, roles, rights and responsibilities of all stakeholders regarding say recharge and discharge/ sustainable yield, information about aquifer depth and groundwater quality, points for pump installation, filter zone in an aquifer, proper spacing, operational hours of tube-wells, energy links, selection of tools for efficient groundwater use like pressurized irrigation, integration of rainwater harvesting-surface-groundwater and collective responses to groundwater quality deterioration as mention by Kulkarni and other researchers.

Groundwater Governance & Management in Pakistan-4: Post #12

D. Why do we need Regulations & Institutional Structures to manage Groundwater Crisis?

 Either we have localized or basin-wide aquifers, the available groundwater belongs to community that is residing there. As the movement of groundwater is too slow, these residents of a local or basin-wide aquifer can further be brought under provincial, district, Union council or even village level. 

However, allowing individuals to do whatever they like, drill a pump any place without giving any consideration to spacing, have well-filters installed to any arbitrary depth, selection of any size of pump and not worrying operational hours and quality of groundwater, is asking for trouble. 

Without a community role, a sustainable use of a common pool like groundwater is difficult to handle. This is where we need groundwater governance. 

To address this tragedy of commons, we need groundwater governance that is essentially a regime established through mainly regulations and institutional structures.

Groundwater Governance & Management in Pakistan-3: Post #11

C: Do We have Groundwater Management Crisis?

Groundwater crisis, in general, refers to the scarcity of good quality and quantity of groundwater from a basin-wide common aquifer relative to the demands of land and water users. Obviously, in case of ineffective groundwater resources management, imbalance of recharge and discharge from an aquifer occurs that can have two kinds of consequences: (1) if recharge is in excess of discharge, the result is water-logging and salinity like areas where our surface water duties are too high and groundwater extractions are minimum; and (2) if discharge from aquifer is more than recharge, the potential outcomes are a drop in water-table and the rise of saline-fresh water interface from the lower depths (dominant case in our context)  to push up  pumping cost higher and to cause quality deterioration. Because of pumping phenomenon, brackish water intrusion into relatively fresh groundwater is happening both vertically as well as horizontally because of brackish groundwater in nearby locations as we observe in many of our areas between two rivers in the Indus Basin.

Obviously, we are facing severe groundwater crisis mainly on two main fronts: (1) Lack of supply-side groundwater management where over-abstractions are causing excessive stress on aquifer conditions by dropping water-tables and quality deterioration and (2) absence of demand-side groundwater management is causing unbridled greed for more and more water extractions by the land-owners and other and water users as population keeps exploding.

As reported by Usman Karim (Imno25@hotmail.com), there were 1000 tube-wells in 1950, 0.5 million in 2000 and 0.7 millions in 2008 just alone in Punjab and total numbers of tube- wells in Pakistan  are reported to be 1.1 million (2008) as per the same estimate.  At present, based on the trend derived from the referred data, we can expect more than 1 and 1.2 million tube-wells in Punjab and Pakistan, respectively. With this unplanned and free-for-all regime is causing over extraction of groundwater to push down water-tables, the rise of saline-freshwater interface and saline-water intrusion to effect the quality of this on-site resource. Moreover, according to a book authored by Qureshi andBarrett-Lennard in 1998, 70% of tube-wells pump sodic water in the Indus Basin.

Because of excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides, industrial waste-water and sewerage water, excessive aquifer pollution is happening. As a consequence of this phenomenon, the contamination of ground and surface water is causing huge health hazards. Some reports suggest that 40% of prevalent diseases and 20-40% hospitalization is mainly attributed to water borne diseases. Usman Karim also reports results of 747 samples collected from various cities of Pakistan. Water analyses show that 19% of total samples had nitrate concentration more than permissible limit of 10 mg/L. To be more precise, this concentration ranges from 11 to 160 mg/L. This contamination jumped to 23% for the water samples collected from Punjab and Baluchistan.

Groundwater use in all sub-sectors is under stress to an extent of crisis. This kind of outcome is mainly because of allowing an access that is free-for-all individuals to pump groundwater from a common pool without any restriction imposed through regulations or any institutional structures.

Groundwater Governance & Management in Pakistan-2: Post #10

B. What do we mean by groundwater management?

In the literature, “groundwater resources management has to deal with balancing the exploitation of a complex resource (in terms of quantity, quality and surface water interactions) with the increasing demand of land and water users (who can pose threat to the resource availability and quality). 

In other words, groundwater resources management has two dominant dimensions: (i) demand-side groundwater management that deals with socio-economic aspect and (ii) supply-side groundwater management associated with hydro-geological aspect.

Groundwater resources management primarily focuses on a sustainable development of the resources by undertaking the following measures:

• ·   Balancing recharge or addition into basin’s storage with groundwater discharges or extractions for human, economic and environmental purposes;
• ·  Protection of groundwater resources from pollution;
•     Control of haphazard and excessive pumping to maintain proper water yield and groundwater quality;
•     Transformation from the ongoing vicious cycle to a virtuous cycle through proper groundwater management.

Groundwater management issues can be described under the following three categories (as reported in an internet based presentation):

1.     Management Functions
a.     Basin planning;

b.     Resource allocation;

c.      Pollution control;

d.     Prevention of side effects; and

e.      Information management.

2.     Technical Inputs:

a.     Resource assessment;

b.     Quality evaluation; and

c.      Aquifer monitoring.

3.     Institutional Provisions:

a.     Water rights;

b.      Regulatory provision;

c.       Water legislation;

d.      Stakeholders’ participation;

e.       Awareness and education; and

f.       Economic valuation instruments.

Groundwater Governance & Management in Pakistan-1: Post#9

A. Why do we need groundwater resources management in Pakistan?

Groundwater plays a critical role for meeting irrigation and domestic needs of Pakistan. According to some reports, the maximum canal-withdrawals are reported to be 105.20 MAF. By assuming 25 % water losses in our canal system, the net river water delivery at the head of watercourse commands comes about 78.9 MAF. With similar assumption about the water losses in the watercourse system, the availability of river water further reduces to 59.18 MAF at the head of the field-ditch system or farm level. Presently, groundwater extractions/ abstractions at national level are around 42.6 MAF available at the stated last community level. This is how we get an overall ratio of surface / river water and groundwater around 58:42. However, during the recent drought in the country, groundwater contribution approached to 50 % to the total water available at the level of field-ditch system. 

In case of Punjab, groundwater is the main source of irrigation water at the head of field-ditch system or farm level. Annual water share of Punjab, as per the Water Apportionment Accord of 1991, is 54.94 MAF. With the above stated assumptions about the water losses in canal and watercourse system, the availability of this share reduces to 31.47 MAF. When compared with groundwater extraction in Punjab being 34.80 MAF; clearly, the extracted quantity of groundwater is higher than the canal water supplies at the field-ditch or farm level (about 52.5%).

 If half of the total (provincial) groundwater extraction, 17.40 MAF, is assumed during winter or Rabi season and then the surface / river water allocation of 18.87 MAF for the same period is reduced to the farm or field-ditch level as per the above referred assumptions, it comes around 10.61 MAF. As the calculated data reveal, the groundwater share of total water supply in Punjab shoots up to almost 62.0 %. 

The above stated situation is what we can expect during normal years durinf winter seasons but the droughts years, we face even a very scary scenario for the entire country in general but Punjab in particular. In 2004-05, when Punjab’s canal water share was reported to be 56% less than normal allocated amount in winter season, groundwater contribution jumped even higher almost touching a figure of 80%.

For academic understanding, Punjab’s excessive dependence on groundwater is worth noting: Punjab has 77 % of total area irrigated in Pakistan but the process of consensus development reduced its share to only 47.67% as compared to 52.33% water share for the rest of 23 % irrigated area of three smaller provinces in the country. 

Obviously, this kind of river water distribution was not based on population, area irrigated or the in-practice design parameters of the barrages and canals in the Indus Basin. This was mainly based on the historic factors as were developed and made reality to live with. This is why that 89% of total tube-well population,  more than 1.2 million, as reported few years back, is confined to Punjab to irrigate 71.2% irrigated area that is served by groundwater either conjunctive with canal water or on exclusive basis.

A skewed river water distribution caused too much dependence on groundwater in Punjab. As Punjab produces almost 80% of agricultural produce of the country, it can’t be ignored as a provincial issue only. In a scenario where 70% of pumped water carries sodic hazards, as reported by Qureshi and Barrett-Lennard in 1998, this will have a huge impact on the national economy. 

If the dominant agricultural production source in Punjab declines because of the forced application of the unfit sodic groundwater, its effects will definitely resonate at the national level with a deafening sound. At present, the revisiting the Water Apportion Accord of 1991 is an impossible option because of the sustained political sensitivities (though, with new provinces on the line, it may become an unavoidable outcome anyway), proper groundwater management is the only option available to focus on for the survival of the agricultural economy in Pakistan. 

Watershed Governance & Management in Pakistan -7 Post 8

Potential Organizational Structure for Watershed Governance & Management 

Watershed Governance & Management in Pakistan - 5: Post #6

Potential Watershed Governance & Management Activities

Pakistan has to consider watershed management as a serious issue for the sustainable benefits of irrigation and power generation, environment, biodiversity and to increase the incomes of users of the watersheds like shepherds, livestock and dairy owners, etc. Range land management is an important function of watershed governance and management. By promoting low cost fencing all federal and provincial rangelands, where it is practical and feasible, into paddocks to ensure a nutritious and plentiful but controlled grazing practice / facility for sheep, goats, livestock and dairy animals on nominal charge basis. 

At initial stage, relevant entities identified for governance and management of watersheds can plan to appraise the current situation of institutional arrangements for watershed management, catchment areas characteristics, current watershed use practices, and status of siltation of dams. 

At the next stage, relevant entities should prepare a plan together with required budgetary outlays for watershed management including both nonstructural and structural measures covering priority small, medium, and large dams. The plan will also include (i) watershed governance  arrangements at grass-root levels through local government system with formal government support in the form of policy, legislation, regulations, monitoring, technical assistance, research and training facilities along with needed backup support for enforcement and surveillance by the local representative entities, (ii) measures to foster coordination with India and Afghanistan to implement similar and confidence building measures in Indian-controlled areas and the Kabil River Basin in Afghanistan , (iii) instituting/upgrading arrangements for better river and stream gauging particularly including silt load measurements and periodic surveys of reservoirs to monitor siltation, and (iv) establishment of technical centers at suitable and representative locations within selected watershed commands to develop applied extension courses for delivery to watershed users: determining stocking rates, improving animal genetics by selection of breeding stock, forage plant characteristics, low cost terracing, water harvesting for forage plants, etc.

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