Tackling Pakistan's water crisis.

Byline: Sadia Hussain

Water is a key strategic resource, and even more so, it is a right that should be freely accessible to the populace today and to succeeding generations. The water resources of Pakistan predominantly consist of groundwater and surface water. Groundwater is a very fundamental, natural resource, found trapped under the surface and extracted through open wells and tube wells, whereas surface water reservoirs consist of rivers, creeks, lakes, streams, ponds, dams etc. Rainwater, as a surface water resource, falls less than 500 mm annually in a semi-arid country like Pakistan, as compared to other countries in the South Asian cohort exceeding 1000mm of rainfall.

Since the incursion of seawater has salinized Karachi's groundwater, the biggest metropolis of Pakistan, its population is totally dependent on surface water, while Lahore, the second biggest city, mainly uses groundwater. Lahore's population is served with 1.29 MAF (million acre feet) of groundwater, extracted through tube wells, hand pumps and motor pumps. As per the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, since anyone can install a tube well of any capacity or depth and extract any amount of water, there are over a million tube wellsin Punjab nowas compared to 0.3 million in the early nineties.

The foreseeable shortage of water Pakistan is going to face in the next couple of years due to unrelenting mismanaged water resources, has given rise to an earnest need to preserve it and provide solutions to combat its scarcity. A World Bank Report has revealed the annual per capita water availability to be less than 3,000 cubic meters in Pakistan which is far less than neighbouring countries.According to the International Monetary Fund's report (2015), Pakistan is headed towards a serious water crisis by 2025 owing to population growth,inefficient use of water for irrigation and overexploitation of groundwater.

Amid official projections elucidating Pakistan's population at 207 million, with an annual growth rate of 2%, it is difficult to confront this crisis without proper education to control the birth rate. However, with population proliferation, competition between relevant factors like environment, household, industry and agriculture is also growing resulting in more water consumption for the gorwing population.

As pera recent report from World Bank, shocking revelations were made with regards to consumption of water by Pakistan's agriculture sector. Pakistan's key...