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Mohsin Leghari

Mohsin Leghari

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Beyond the accord: How Pakistan must learn to govern scarcity

Beyond the accord: How Pakistan must learn to govern scarcity

Two of the world’s most intensively managed river basins are confronting versions of a problem Pakistan can no longer postpone. In the American...

latest 4

Pakistan Today Profit

Mohsin Leghari

The System That Still Works, But For How Long?

The System That Still Works, But For How Long?

At the end of the nineteenth century, the tract that would become Lyallpur district was still sparsely populated. Within a generation of the arrival...

01.10.2026 20

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

Pakistan must stop growing crops it cannot afford to water

Pakistan must stop growing crops it cannot afford to water

For decades, Pakistan has asked the wrong questions about its agriculture. How much wheat did we grow? How many bales of cotton? How many tonnes of...

01.10.2026 10

Pakistan Today Profit

Mohsin Leghari

We Divided The Indus. We Never Learned To Govern Scarcity

The Colorado River crisis carries a warning for Pakistan: allocating water is not the same as governing scarcity. The Colorado River is running short...

11.09.2026 60

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

What The Murray–Darling Basin Can Teach Pakistan About Saving The Indus

10.09.2026 40

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

Who Governs Pakistan’s Water?

Follow a drop of water in Pakistan, from glacier to reservoir, through barrage and canal, into an aquifer, across a farm and through a city....

10.09.2026 200

The Nation

Mohsin Leghari

2050 Begins At The Tubewell

Pakistan’s water future will be decided not only by how much flows down the Indus, but by what we pump, what we grow and how efficiently we use it....

07.09.2026 50

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

The Indus Doesn’t Read Maps

Pakistan is debating a new constitutional order as if water will adjust afterwards. It will not. In 1947, the Radcliffe Line was drawn across Punjab...

24.08.2026 50

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

Full Dams, Narrow Margins

In the early hours of 10 August, after days of rapid filling, Tarbela touched its maximum conservation level of 5.58 million acre-feet. Mangla, on the...

11.08.2026 70

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

Facta Non Verba: Pakistan's Forty-Eight-Year Flood Protection Cycle

On 30 July 2026, Federal Minister for Planning Ahsan Iqbal announced that the National Flood Protection Plan would be placed before the Council of...

04.08.2026 90

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

The Schedule, Not the Surprise

By late July 2026, according to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), the monsoon that had begun just weeks earlier had already claimed...

04.08.2026 60

The Nation

Mohsin Leghari

The Import Bill: Paying In Dollars What We Refused To Pay In Rupees

Last week the Food Security Minister announced that Pakistan would import wheat. The decision was presented as market stabilisation. It is better...

31.07.2026 60

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

The Rivers Are Rising, And Our Tools Are Broken

In late July 2026, the Ravi and Chenab are again testing the limits of everything built along their banks. At Abdul Hakeem, the Ravi is taking in far...

27.07.2026 70

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

The Lost Science Of Indus Togetherness

More than three thousand years ago, the poets of the Rig Veda imagined the Indus Basin differently. In the Nadi Sukta, the Hymn of the Rivers, they...

25.07.2026 60

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

What Punjab Can Learn From Punjab

Indian Punjab has unintentionally conducted two experiments. One demonstrates that a neglected canal system can be restored to life. The other...

14.07.2026 60

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

The Price Of Water Will Be Judged At The Tail

At the farm gate, a government demand notice never arrives as an economic theory. It arrives as another bill. That is why Punjab’s revised abiana is...

29.06.2026 70

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

Price of Water

Punjab has revised its water rate, and the argument it has set off is the wrong one. Under the Punjab Irrigation, Drainage and Rivers Act 2023, the...

28.06.2026 100

The Nation

Mohsin Leghari

Nobody Inaugurates Maintenance

Every government likes to build. A new building earns a ribbon-cutting ceremony. A new bridge becomes a headline. A new hospital is hailed as a symbol...

22.06.2026 50

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

India, Irrigation, And The Internal Fault Lines Of Pakistan’s Water Security

Pakistan's water debate has become increasingly focused on India. The reasons are understandable. Indian leaders have openly questioned the...

06.06.2026 80

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

The Lever Upstream, The Crisis Downstream

Every section of Pakistan's water crisis has a known technical solution. Every one of those solutions has been blocked not by engineering failure...

05.06.2026 70

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

Rewriting Rules of Control

The court ruled. The gates didn't. When I wrote about the Chenab last month, the argument was still partly inferential. The Marala hydrograph for...

05.06.2026 60

The Nation

Mohsin Leghari

Moving The Chenab: How A Tunnel Challenges The Indus Waters Treaty

I have written about the Chenab's pulses, the sharp surges and sudden troughs that turn a Himalayan river into a regulated instrument. Those...

30.05.2026 90

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

When Wheat Becomes The Wrong Crop

The farmer does not leave wheat out of sentiment. He leaves when the arithmetic forces him to. In Okara, in Sahiwal, and in parts of Bahawalpur and...

26.05.2026 60

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

Why The 2026 Harvest Is A Federal Failure, Not Four Provincial Ones

Pakistan treats wheat procurement as a provincial matter. The market does not. A procurement failure in Punjab travels. It moves through flour prices...

25.05.2026 70

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

The Political Economy Of Wheat: Who The System Was Built For

Every policy distributes risk. Punjab's wheat transition was presented as a technical reform: reduce fiscal exposure, expand private...

23.05.2026 60

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

Reforms Need Discipline: Markets Cannot Replace Institutions Through Notification Alone

Governments often imagine that reform begins when a policy is announced. In commodity markets, reform begins much later: when banks decide whether to...

22.05.2026 90

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

The Harvest Window: Forty-Five Days That Determine Pakistan’s Food Year

On the first of April, in Haroonabad, the wheat was ready. The harvesters had moved through the fields. Grain bags were stacked along the roadside....

21.05.2026 60

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

When Chenab Stops Behaving Like a River

13.05.2026 70

The Nation

Mohsin Leghari

The Indus Without Law

For more than six decades, one of the world's most unlikely diplomatic achievements quietly endured between two nuclear-armed states that have...

12.05.2026 100

The Friday Times

Mohsin Leghari

Punjab Is Failing Wheat Farmers

Punjab’s wheat harvest is laying bare a policy transition that may have made fiscal sense on paper, but has been badly handled in practice. The...

21.04.2026 100

The Nation

Mohsin Leghari

Before the Waters Rise Again

When the cloudbursts struck Buner in August 2025, thirty-six members of one family retreated to what they believed were safe rooms. The NDMA red alert...

13.03.2026 100

The Nation

Mohsin Leghari

From The Hague to Hafizabad

Faisal, a rice farmer in Hafizabad, does not know that a courtroom in The Hague matters to him. The farmers in Faisalabad, whose wheat crop depends on...

28.02.2026 90

The Nation

Mohsin Leghari

Pakistan’s Water War

02.02.2026 80

The Nation

Mohsin Leghari

Water Policy: A Seven-Year Itch

17.12.2025 100

The Nation

Mohsin Leghari

Indus vs Governance

22.11.2025 70

The Nation

Mohsin Leghari

Fix the water system

19.11.2025 90

The News International

Mohsin Leghari

Prevention was possible

06.10.2025 70

The News International

Mohsin Leghari

Prevention or Perpetual Treatment?

15.09.2025 70

The Nation

Mohsin Leghari

Drowning in negligence

10.09.2025 60

The News International

Mohsin Leghari

The path beyond flood warfare

The 2025 Punjab floods affecting 3,300 villages show why ancient wisdom beats modern warfare against rivers The images from Punjab this monsoon tell...

10.09.2025 100

Business Recorder

Mohsin Leghari

Laws Exist, but Water Rules Us

02.09.2025 90

The Nation

Mohsin Leghari

Pakistan’s parched future: bonds to bridge the water funding chasm

As the monsoons arrive, once again, Pakistan is facing a water crisis, shifting from drought-like scenarios to the threat of a flood. The seasonal...

23.07.2025 70

Business Recorder

Mohsin Leghari

Pakistan’s Water Paradox

13.07.2025 80

The Nation

Mohsin Leghari