Pakistan speaks often of agricultural transformation, new seeds, climate-smart technologies, value chains, mechanisation and digital extension. But every plan rests on a fragile assumption: that water will simply continue to arrive. It will not.
The water system on which Pakistan built its agricultural economy is deteriorating faster than any agricultural roadmap can compensate for. Until that system is rebuilt – governed, measured, regulated and made predictable – agriculture cannot improve.
The Indus Basin Irrigation System feeds more than 90 per cent of Pakistan’s crops, yet a large share of the water released at canal heads never reaches the crop. Recent empirical work on the Pakistani part of the Indus Basin shows losses of about half across canals, distributaries, watercourses and fields. There are structural failures. Farmers cannot adopt improved seed when water rotations are unpredictable. A value chain cannot function when tail-end supplies collapse. In Pakistan, yields do not fall because of farmers’ negligence; they fall because water does not show up.
Groundwater has long served as the country’s silent stabiliser, compensating for unreliable canals. It now sustains more than half of irrigated agriculture, pumped from about 1.4 million private tubewells. Peer-reviewed groundwater research shows that lifting 1,000 cubic metres from a shallow tubewell costs about Rs4,225. For smallholders, this threefold cost difference over the years wipes out profitability.
Case-study modelling in Rechna Doab shows how sensitive agriculture is to depth: when groundwater levels drop from around six metres to over twenty metres, pumping costs rise more than threefold. The pattern is visible across many canal-command areas, even if depths differ. Groundwater is becoming too deep and too expensive to sustain the crops it once supported.
Yet Pakistan’s cropping response moves in the opposite direction. Cotton has been steadily replaced not only by sugarcane and rice, often in the very districts where groundwater tables are falling fastest. Sugarcane consumes 5,900 to 11,130 cubic metres per acre. Rice, typically requires 3,240 to 6,070 cubic metres per acre. Both are dramatically higher than cotton’s requirement of 1,620 to 2,830 cubic metres per acre.
For farmers, sugarcane and rice offer predictable buyers, assured procurement and political backing. But hydrologically, the shift is self-defeating. Pakistan is expanding its most water-hungry crops at the exact moment when surface flows are unreliable and groundwater extraction is becoming prohibitively costly. It locks the country into an impossible equation: declining water availability paired with rising water demand.
The 1991 Water Apportionment Accord provides a binding, rules-based mechanism for allocating flows. Yet in practice, allocations remain political rather than hydrological. Telemetry systems, essential for transparency remain contested or non-functional. Groundwater, despite sustaining most of Pakistan’s agriculture, remains almost entirely unregulated.
The failure of the 2024 IRSA Amendment Ordinance illustrates this paralysis. The proposal aimed to introduce a national framework for regulating groundwater extraction, aligned with global practice and supported by scientific evidence. It failed not because the hydrology was disputed but because provinces resisted losing discretionary control. This leaves Pakistan with a paradox: one of the world’s largest extractors of groundwater, yet with no enforceable safe-yield limits, no aquifer-level accounting and no institutional mechanism linking groundwater use to agricultural planning. This is a governance failure more than anything else.
Decades of agricultural programming reveal the same lesson. Even the most advanced interventions fail inside a broken water system. Drip irrigation delivers marginal gains when canals lose half their supply upstream. High-yield seed cannot perform when irrigation timings collapse. Market-linked pulse programmes falter when groundwater depths increase from 10 to 12 metres and pumping costs overwhelm crop returns. Agricultural programmes often blame ‘farmer adoption constraints’. In reality, the constraint is water. Its unreliability, its cost, its politics, and its misgovernance.
If Pakistan wants agriculture to grow, water governance must anchor the agricultural roadmap. Surface water must move from negotiation-based allocation to real-time, transparent, validated distribution through functional telemetry and enforceable rotational schedules.
Groundwater must be regulated through safe-yield thresholds, licensing of high-capacity tubewells in stressed aquifers, and integration of surface–groundwater planning. Agricultural incentives must stop rewarding high-delta crops in water-stressed areas and shift toward crops that match hydrological reality. Farmers cannot be expected to grow water-efficient alternatives when the market, the subsidy regime and the institutional environment push them in the opposite direction.
Where integration between water, agriculture, irrigation and climate departments has occurred, progress is visible. Where these sectors remain siloed, deterioration accelerates. The CCI was created precisely to prevent this fragmentation. It can still fulfil that purpose, if empowered and supported.
The political challenges are undeniable. Reform disrupts entrenched interests, challenges provincial autonomy narratives, and demands coordination across institutions that have historically avoided collaboration. But the alternative is certain decline. Per capita water availability has fallen below scarcity thresholds. Aquifers in key districts are approaching irreversible depletion. Climate volatility, from the 2022 floods to the intensified 2025 monsoon, has made agricultural planning dangerously uncertain.
Pakistan does not lack agricultural skill; it lacks water-governance coherence. Every rupee spent on agricultural development without corresponding investment in water reform is partially wasted. Every stalled telemetry system, every overridden rotational schedule and every unregulated tubewell pushes agriculture deeper into structural crisis. If Pakistan wants an agricultural revival, it must begin where agriculture begins, with water. Fix the water system and agriculture will recover. Ignore it and no amount of policy, passion or programming will prevent decline.
Water governance is not the parallel track. It is the track. Everything else runs on it.
The writer is a former Punjab minister for irrigation and finance, with extensive experience in Pakistan’s provincial and federal legislatures.
