DURING the 2025 monsoon, surplus Sutlej floodwaters were diverted from Islam Headworks into the abandoned Old Mailsi Canal—not to irrigate fields, but to recharge the aquifer beneath them. Equipped with 144 recharge wells, the pilot project stored nearly 12,000 acre-feet of floodwater underground, turning an obsolete canal into a vast freshwater bank. In one remarkable intervention, a flood was transformed into a strategic reserve. That experiment should not remain a local success story; rather, it should be scaled up as a regional blueprint.

For more than seven decades, India and Pakistan have looked at the Indus Basin through the same narrow lens: whoever controls the rivers controls the future. Every dam is viewed as a strategic signal, every barrage as a political statement and every fluctuation in river flow as evidence of hostile intent.........

© Pakistan Observer