Mohsin Leghari
Why the Indus has become a forensic case of missing volumes, broken rules, and collapsing trust.
Pakistan is water-scarce and becoming more so. But scarcity is not what is tearing the federation apart. The deeper emergency is political: a collapse of shared facts. When provinces no longer agree on how much water exists, where it goes, and who receives what, every discussion becomes an accusation. Every shortage becomes a conspiracy. Every institutional decision becomes a vote along provincial lines rather than a conclusion based on evidence.
The latest flashpoint is the Cholistan Canal episode—a dispute over whether a new canal command can be justified when downstream confidence in allocations is already collapsing. It reopened the oldest question in Pakistan’s water politics: who decides, on what data, and under which rules, when the system is already tight? Punjab maintains that the Cholistan Canal, intended to irrigate millions of acres, would draw only from its share of flood surpluses without touching provincial entitlements. Sindh sees the same project as proof that upstream ambitions expand while downstream flows shrink. Without agreed data and binding adjudication, neither claim can be verified. Every development project becomes a referendum on trust.
The Indus is not just a river. It is the federal contract in liquid form. If it is perceived as unfairly managed, no other national promise survives for long.
To understand today’s mistrust, one must understand what the 1991 Water Apportionment Accord was meant to do. It was a rare moment of political maturity: all four provinces agreed to a settlement that had eluded them for decades. The Accord was designed to move Pakistan away from the crude principle of “whoever can take more, gets more”—the logic that dominated the late 1970s and early 1980s, when allocations often reflected actual withdrawals rather than principled distribution. Punjab, with upstream advantage and stronger infrastructure, could draw more reliably. Sindh, as the lower riparian, saw this as proof that without enforceable rules, downstream rights become rhetoric.
The Accord tried to correct that imbalance, uplifting Sindh and the smaller provinces. But it carried an optimism Pakistan never fulfilled: the assumption that future storage would make those allocations reliably deliverable. No large new mainstem storage has expanded the system’s carryover capacity at the scale the Accord implicitly assumed. Sedimentation has eroded usable storage, and a framework built for stability and growth has been forced to operate under recurring scarcity.
Yet the Accord’s greatest vulnerability is interpretive. On one side stands its normative heart: fixed provincial allocations. On the other stands Paragraph 14(b), which references the 1977–82 period of “actual average system uses” as a guideline for operational patterns—a snapshot of pre-Accord withdrawals, before provincial rights were politically reset. Sindh reads the Accord as a constitution: rights are rights, and shortage should mean proportional cuts. Punjab argues that, in scarcity, distribution must protect historic use because that reflects what canal infrastructure can physically sustain.
This is not a semantic quarrel. It is a battle over federal equity.
This tension turns explosive when shortages are declared even with reservoirs at 99 per cent levels, as happened in Rabi 2025–26, when IRSA announced an 8 per cent deficit despite near-full storage. Paragraph 14(b) stops being an interpretive reference and begins to behave like a governing rule. Faced with permanent stress, IRSA adopted a tiered approach, shifting between Accord allocations and historic-use patterns depending on availability. Politically, this became combustible, because it institutionalised Sindh’s deepest fear: that when water tightens, the system reverts to upstream priority, and downstream receives what remains.
Instead of a legally settled shortage-sharing rule, the federation has drifted into an operational grey zone, neither Accord-compliant nor formally amended. Every decision looks improvised, and every improvised decision looks biased.
A federation survives conflict when it can settle disputes with trusted numbers. Pakistan cannot. Across decades of records, a persistent gap exists between recorded inflows, reported withdrawals, and measured downstream releases. Call it conveyance loss, measurement error, groundwater recharge, or unaccounted abstraction—the label matters less than the consequence. When a significant volume cannot be transparently reconciled, theft becomes indistinguishable from physics. When nothing can be proven, politics fills the vacuum. The conflict is no longer only about distribution; it is about the legitimacy of the data itself.
While provinces fight, the environment has become the residual claimant. The Indus Delta requires sustained freshwater to prevent seawater intrusion and preserve fisheries. Yet downstream flows have degraded, especially in winter, leaving long stretches when the river dies before reaching the sea. This is not an environmentalist’s lament; it is a national security warning. Salinity creep destroys land and livelihoods. Seawater intrusion has rendered vast tracts uncultivable, emptying villages that once sustained themselves on fishing and agriculture. Once ecological decline becomes structural, no upstream negotiation can reverse it. The Accord acknowledged downstream needs in principle but attached no enforceable volumetric obligation. What is not measured and mandated becomes expendable.
IRSA was meant to be a neutral regulator. In practice, it mirrors provincial arithmetic; decisions become majoritarian, and Sindh often finds itself isolated. The Council of Common Interests—the constitutional forum for settling such disputes—has repeatedly deferred decisive rulings, urging “amicable” settlements. But water conflict does not dissolve through goodwill. It dissolves through rules everyone accepts as legitimate.
Pakistan does not need another rhetorical consensus. It needs a measurement revolution and legal clarity.
Telemetry is not optional; it is the foundation of federal trust. Real-time flow measurement—tamper-resistant and independently verifiable—must become the minimum standard. Independent verification must come from a mechanism no province controls, through third-party audit and public disclosure. Pakistan has no comparable, public, real-time water dashboard. That absence is a choice, not a constraint.
Pakistan also needs explicit shortage-sharing rules endorsed at the highest constitutional forum. If Paragraph 14(b) is to govern scarcity, it must be clearly codified, not negotiated each time through operational practice. If Paragraph 2 remains sovereign, operations must align accordingly. The Council of Common Interests, constitutionally empowered but politically hesitant, must be reformed to issue binding, time-bound rulings on water disputes, not merely convene committees that defer and dissolve. The federation must stop improvising in the dark.
And the delta must stop being an afterthought. Environmental flows should be a mandatory system requirement, accounted for upfront. What cannot be measured cannot be protected. What is not protected will eventually collapse.
Pakistan’s water crisis is not merely a story of less water. It is a story of mistrust. If we want the Indus to remain a river that binds rather than divides, we must rebuild the one thing no dam can replace: trust—measured, verified, and enforced.
The writer is a former Senator, MPA, MNA, and former Minister of Irrigation Punjab.
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