Water,governance and corruption-Pakistan
This is a review of the essay by Feisal khan; from the book “Running on empty-Pakistan’s water crisis” published by Woodrow Wilson International centre for scholars. Feisal khan is assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
In the article ,Feisal khan highlights the major factors behind the brutality of the Pakistani water crisis and attributes these factors to a historical legacy of bad policies, misgovernance, and corruption.
He starts with the narration of 2005 analysis of the Pakistani water situation by the World Bank. The facts and figures mentioned are very distressing. Pakistan seems to be one of the most arid and water-stressed countries, on par with those of the Sahara Desert. A per capita annual water availability of 1,000 cubic meters (m3) is believed to be low enough to “impede development and harm human health”. Indeed, in one important sense, the story of Pakistani agriculture is a story of declining farm-gate. The author has represented the declining per capita water availability in Pakistan graphically. The graph shows water availability of 3000 m3/capita/year to less than a 1000 in 2035.The comparison of yields and water productivity of wheat in USA, Pakistan, and India shows the clear difference in outputs of wheat crop per hectare. Seven tons/ha is obtained in USA,3.9 tons in India and just 2 tons in Pakistan.
Pakistan’s wheat yield is low as compared to US and the yield of Punjab which represents the breadbasket of Pakistan is approximately half than that of Indian Punjab.
Considering the importance of water to Pakistan’s economy and its relative scarcity, water conservation and use-efficiency should be high on Pakistan’s list of national priorities but they are not. A major factor behind the severity of the Pakistani water crisis is a historical legacy of bad policies, misgovernance, and corruption.
Work on the Pakistani irrigation system was started by the British colonial administration and Pakistan had an extensive and well-developed irrigation structure with provincial irrigation departments of considerable technical expertise and professional ability after the independence. Soon after independence, India started tempering with the Pakistan’s water resources. In 1948, India shut down water flow to Pakistan in 1948. The Punjab Irrigation Department rapidly dug the 100-mile Bombanwala-Ravi-Bedian-Dipalpur canal to divert water from the Ravi to the Sutlej River, thereby forestalling another Indian attempt to cripple Pakistan by shutting the downstream flow of the Sutlej.
Basically the colonial-era irrigation department focused on technical administration and water project construction, with virtually all decisions made internally and without any user input into the decision-making process. The colonial-era Canal and Drainage Act of 1873 gave the state all rights and authority over water issues. The legal lack of rights for the water users was more strengthened by government of Pakistan amendments that stripped the Act of the extremely limited redress available to water users—i.e., farmers. This was done to consolidate power of loyalist large land owners and micromanage small farmers. This situation has remained till date and irrigation official power has remained unchecked.
In 1959, Military govt. of General Ayub established WAPDA to plan and implement a strategy for Pakistan’s water resources. As part of the water-use planning policy, the riparian dispute with India were resolved with the signing Indus water treaty in 1960.After Indus water treaty, Mangla and Tarbela dams were established. These were highly successful projects with extensive economic benefits for the Pakistani economy.
The bad policies responsible for water crisis include inadequate infrastructure investment, especially in maintenance and repair. World Bank characterizes Pakistani government policy as “Build/Neglect/Rebuild,” where all basic maintenance is literally ignored until the infrastructure is on the verge of collapse. The Promotion of sugar cane cultivation has a negative impact on the already precarious water situation as well. Besides that ;massive diversion of river waters into agriculture has led to a decline in the lower Sindh wetlands, the Indus Delta mangrove forests, and coastal fishing, as well as taken a horrible toll on the biodiversity and fauna of the entire Indus Basin ecosystem. All this has exacerbated a bad water situation, and decades of neglect have allowed major problems to reach near-catastrophic levels.
The water bureaucracy is notoriously corrupt. There is no effective internal administrative check on decisions made by irrigation bureaucrats. Second, they are more vulnerable to pressure to “accommodate” large local landowners and politicians. The level of money involved is staggering. The senior officials pay “crores of rupees” to obtain desirable posts and turn down “clean jobs at four times the [official] salary” because the bribe income is 5-8 times more than the clean salary. In 2002, many farmers were charged an annual “fee” of Rs. 30,000 for each watercourse outlet.With about 60,000 outlets in the irrigation system, this gives an income of roughly Rs. 1.8 billion to be shared among irrigation officials. And this is just for having a water outlet that gets some water at some point. This fee did not entitle a farmer to more than one’s share.At least 25 percent of farmers report bribing irrigation officials for irrigation water, with the typical payment averaging about 2.5 percent of income/hectare.
Nawaz sharif made an effort to reform through decentralization by implementing the Provincial Irrigation Authority Act of 1997.But in practice ,nothing changed because the water rights and entitlements were not on the immediate agenda of the government. The government’s habit of creating more institutions to cover the inefficiency of parent institutions is one cause of the ineffective water reforms too.
The government needs a radical restructuring of water use patterns and effective implementation to save Pakistan from disaster. We also need to eliminate corruption from the water administrating authorities. Some major reform efforts will have to be undertaken to shore up the system. The professional competence and integrity of the provincial irrigation bureaucracies need to be improved, and this will require greater centralization and reassertion of administrative control and not devolution and decentralization so that large landowners cannot threaten or bribe officials. At the same time, the government of Pakistan should also discourage sugarcane cultivation and increase the freshwater flow to the Indus Delta. The prospects for any meaningful reforms in Pakistani agricultural and irrigation administration are extremely unlikely in the immediate future. Pakistan’s water crisis and attendant misgovernance will surely worsen.
Reference:
Khan, Feisal. “Water, Governance and Corruption in Pakistan.” In Kugelman (Ed.) “Running on Empty: Pakistan’s Water Crisis.” 2009, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
In the article ,Feisal khan highlights the major factors behind the brutality of the Pakistani water crisis and attributes these factors to a historical legacy of bad policies, misgovernance, and corruption.
He starts with the narration of 2005 analysis of the Pakistani water situation by the World Bank. The facts and figures mentioned are very distressing. Pakistan seems to be one of the most arid and water-stressed countries, on par with those of the Sahara Desert. A per capita annual water availability of 1,000 cubic meters (m3) is believed to be low enough to “impede development and harm human health”. Indeed, in one important sense, the story of Pakistani agriculture is a story of declining farm-gate. The author has represented the declining per capita water availability in Pakistan graphically. The graph shows water availability of 3000 m3/capita/year to less than a 1000 in 2035.The comparison of yields and water productivity of wheat in USA, Pakistan, and India shows the clear difference in outputs of wheat crop per hectare. Seven tons/ha is obtained in USA,3.9 tons in India and just 2 tons in Pakistan.
Pakistan’s wheat yield is low as compared to US and the yield of Punjab which represents the breadbasket of Pakistan is approximately half than that of Indian Punjab.
Considering the importance of water to Pakistan’s economy and its relative scarcity, water conservation and use-efficiency should be high on Pakistan’s list of national priorities but they are not. A major factor behind the severity of the Pakistani water crisis is a historical legacy of bad policies, misgovernance, and corruption.
Work on the Pakistani irrigation system was started by the British colonial administration and Pakistan had an extensive and well-developed irrigation structure with provincial irrigation departments of considerable technical expertise and professional ability after the independence. Soon after independence, India started tempering with the Pakistan’s water resources. In 1948, India shut down water flow to Pakistan in 1948. The Punjab Irrigation Department rapidly dug the 100-mile Bombanwala-Ravi-Bedian-Dipalpur canal to divert water from the Ravi to the Sutlej River, thereby forestalling another Indian attempt to cripple Pakistan by shutting the downstream flow of the Sutlej.
Basically the colonial-era irrigation department focused on technical administration and water project construction, with virtually all decisions made internally and without any user input into the decision-making process. The colonial-era Canal and Drainage Act of 1873 gave the state all rights and authority over water issues. The legal lack of rights for the water users was more strengthened by government of Pakistan amendments that stripped the Act of the extremely limited redress available to water users—i.e., farmers. This was done to consolidate power of loyalist large land owners and micromanage small farmers. This situation has remained till date and irrigation official power has remained unchecked.
In 1959, Military govt. of General Ayub established WAPDA to plan and implement a strategy for Pakistan’s water resources. As part of the water-use planning policy, the riparian dispute with India were resolved with the signing Indus water treaty in 1960.After Indus water treaty, Mangla and Tarbela dams were established. These were highly successful projects with extensive economic benefits for the Pakistani economy.
The bad policies responsible for water crisis include inadequate infrastructure investment, especially in maintenance and repair. World Bank characterizes Pakistani government policy as “Build/Neglect/Rebuild,” where all basic maintenance is literally ignored until the infrastructure is on the verge of collapse. The Promotion of sugar cane cultivation has a negative impact on the already precarious water situation as well. Besides that ;massive diversion of river waters into agriculture has led to a decline in the lower Sindh wetlands, the Indus Delta mangrove forests, and coastal fishing, as well as taken a horrible toll on the biodiversity and fauna of the entire Indus Basin ecosystem. All this has exacerbated a bad water situation, and decades of neglect have allowed major problems to reach near-catastrophic levels.
The water bureaucracy is notoriously corrupt. There is no effective internal administrative check on decisions made by irrigation bureaucrats. Second, they are more vulnerable to pressure to “accommodate” large local landowners and politicians. The level of money involved is staggering. The senior officials pay “crores of rupees” to obtain desirable posts and turn down “clean jobs at four times the [official] salary” because the bribe income is 5-8 times more than the clean salary. In 2002, many farmers were charged an annual “fee” of Rs. 30,000 for each watercourse outlet.With about 60,000 outlets in the irrigation system, this gives an income of roughly Rs. 1.8 billion to be shared among irrigation officials. And this is just for having a water outlet that gets some water at some point. This fee did not entitle a farmer to more than one’s share.At least 25 percent of farmers report bribing irrigation officials for irrigation water, with the typical payment averaging about 2.5 percent of income/hectare.
Nawaz sharif made an effort to reform through decentralization by implementing the Provincial Irrigation Authority Act of 1997.But in practice ,nothing changed because the water rights and entitlements were not on the immediate agenda of the government. The government’s habit of creating more institutions to cover the inefficiency of parent institutions is one cause of the ineffective water reforms too.
The government needs a radical restructuring of water use patterns and effective implementation to save Pakistan from disaster. We also need to eliminate corruption from the water administrating authorities. Some major reform efforts will have to be undertaken to shore up the system. The professional competence and integrity of the provincial irrigation bureaucracies need to be improved, and this will require greater centralization and reassertion of administrative control and not devolution and decentralization so that large landowners cannot threaten or bribe officials. At the same time, the government of Pakistan should also discourage sugarcane cultivation and increase the freshwater flow to the Indus Delta. The prospects for any meaningful reforms in Pakistani agricultural and irrigation administration are extremely unlikely in the immediate future. Pakistan’s water crisis and attendant misgovernance will surely worsen.
Reference:
Khan, Feisal. “Water, Governance and Corruption in Pakistan.” In Kugelman (Ed.) “Running on Empty: Pakistan’s Water Crisis.” 2009, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
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