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).