A Concept of Water Banks for Irrigated Agriculture in Pakistan: Post 29

A 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 more for the ground water.  It is estimated that 15 minutes of relatively inferior quality pumped water  costs more than what the farmers pay using better quality canal water for the entire irrigation season per acre.

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.

Unstoppable process of development and an exponential growth in population have pushed 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.

The 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 systems and managed by its stakeholders with obligatory support by the relevant public entities.