Water reaching the Arabian Sea is called waste. That sentence has been emptying the Indus Delta for seventy years. “We can understand the pain of downstream people and the river if, and only if, we think of ourselves as the lower riparian.” Kharo Chan once held some forty villages. A handful remain. The census that counted about 26,000 people there in the 1980s now counts about 11,000. They left because the sea came inland, the wells turned saline, the rice fields crusted with salt, and the river that had held back the tide no longer arrived. This is not a sudden disaster. It is a slow eviction, made possible by decisions taken far above the last barrage on the Indus. The official name for those decisions is water allocation. The working language is blunter: Pani zaya ho raha hai. Water is being wasted to the sea. That sentence is the most successful political idea in Pakistan’s water history. It is also untrue. And it survives because the people who repeat it do not live where the river ends.

The quarrel is older than the state. In 1945, the Chief Engineers of Sindh and Punjab gave the lower riparian about three-quarters of the main-stem Indus and required its consent for new upstream works. Partition broke that compact. One Unit then allowed barrages and link canals to be built without a provincial veto. The Chashma–Jhelum and Taunsa–Panjnad links, raised as replacement works after the 1960 Treaty, are still opened in seasons when Sindh’s early Kharif is already short. The 1991 Water Apportionment Accord remains the law of the river: 55.94 million acre-feet for Punjab and 48.76 million acre-feet........

© The Friday Times