There is something almost absurd about factories cutting production beside an almost full reservoir. Yet that is the predicament confronting Hub, where locals say inadequate water supplies have persisted for two months, forcing units below capacity and prompting an SOS to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.
The Hub Chamber of Commerce and Industry warns that prolonged shortages could eventually threaten thousands of jobs. Hub Dam was completed in 1981 as an inter-provincial asset serving Karachi and Lasbela. WAPDA’s design provides 63.3 per cent of reservoir releases to Sindh and 36.7 per cent to Balochistan, including 100 million gallons a day for Karachi, 15 MGD for local industries and another 44 MGD for irrigation. HCCI says the Hub of roughly 20,000 people in the 1980s has become a city of around 300 industries, with more than 25,000 cultivated acres and a population said to be above one million
Indeed, the growth is partly evidence that earlier state investment worked. Hub Industrial Trading Estate now spreads over 1,226 acres and accommodates textiles, engineering, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food processing, steel and other industries. Meanwhile, Islamabad is facilitating a proposed $4.5 billion deep-conversion refinery at Hub that its sponsors say could create around 2,000 jobs. All said and done, the federal government cannot spend diplomatic capital persuading investors to build the next generation of industry while existing production lines ration one of industry’s most elementary inputs. Since Karachi also depends heavily on Hub Dam, a wiser intervention could be an updated demand and infrastructure audit: how much water actually reaches each user, how much is lost between reservoir and factory gate, whether present industrial allocations bear any resemblance to current production needs, how much treated wastewater can be reused and what additional storage or supply Hub will require as its economic footprint expands.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif therefore has an opportunity larger than settling an allocation dispute. His government has tied Pakistan’s economic recovery to investment, exports, and import substitution.
Hub sits at the meeting point of all three and therefore, federal coordination can demonstrate the kind of responsive federalism that development requires– by protecting Karachi’s legitimate needs while ensuring that Balochistan’s most important industrial concentration is not punished for having outgrown yesterday’s assumptions.
