On December 8 (2025), the Asian Development Bank’s Asian Water Development Outlook 2025 stripped away any remaining ambiguity. More than 80 per cent of Pakistanis lack access to safe drinking water. Per-capita availability has fallen to around 1,100 cubic metres, well into scarcity territory. Unregulated groundwater extraction is not only depleting aquifers but spreading arsenic contamination across agricultural heartlands.
Yet the report’s most damning revelation is not physical scarcity but the near-stagnation of governance. Pakistan’s economic water security score crawled from 9.1 in 2013 to 10 in 2025 out of 100, while environmental water security regressed. The diagnosis is complete: Pakistan is no longer short of ideas or frameworks on paper; it is short of the institutional muscle to translate them into delivery. The ‘missing middle’ between signed policy and a flowing tap.
That missing middle is visible across the federation. In Quetta, deeper bores each year are an admission that the city is living on borrowed groundwater. In Karachi, water often arrives through a tanker market rather than a utility, and the tanker price becomes the real tariff. In the canal colonies of Punjab and Sindh, the tragedy belongs to the tail-ender: when the state fails to maintain channels or enforce warabandi turns, the farmer at the end replaces public delivery with a private tubewell, migrating his bill underground and trading diesel or subsidised electricity for a receding water table.
Pakistan is not short of institutional architecture. The 1991 Water Apportionment Accord remains a landmark federal bargain. The 2018 National Water Policy, approved by the Council of Common Interests, set out what modern water governance requires: credible accounting, institutional coordination and groundwater regulation. Provincial instruments followed. Provinces showed legislative headways -- Punjab’s Water Act (2019), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Water Act (2020) and Sindh’s Water Policy (2023). But instruments are not operating systems. They do not restrain behaviour unless they produce routine measurement, routine compliance and enforceable rules for stress years.
Measurement is the clearest example. Real-time telemetry was meant to create a single version of the truth. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s canal telemetry shows the technology can work when it is treated as administration, not an existential dispute. Nationally, the federal telemetry project, reported in the range of Rs21.5 billion to Rs23.8 billion and contracted in 2024, now targets commissioning in December 2026–27 amid lingering inter-provincial disagreement on placement and trust. Where data remains contested or delayed, ‘volume balance errors’ become political resources, and trust evaporates first in any drought.
Three accelerating shifts now make this execution gap more dangerous than at any point in our history. First, climate volatility has deleted the ‘average year’ our infrastructure and political habits were built for. Catastrophic floods now alternate with punishing droughts. Without pre-agreed, transparent shortage-sharing rules accepted in times of plenty and applied automatically in times of want, every dry spell risks mutating into a federal crisis. A volatile climate cannot be governed by ad hoc bargaining.
Second, groundwater, for long Pakistan’s escape hatch has become a trap. When surface systems falter, pumping surges. This buffer kept farms productive and cities functioning, but it is now overdrawn and increasingly contaminated. The response cannot be a moral lecture, and it cannot be a fantasy of overnight shutdowns. It must be practical: stress mapping, protection of drinking-water zones, phased registration and licensing where feasible, and transition support that helps farmers shift to efficiency rather than simply absorb a new punishment.
Third, the solar paradox. The rapid shift to solar-powered pumping is a climate and energy win, yet it removes the only natural brake on extraction by driving marginal pumping costs toward zero. Without conditioning subsidies on measurable water outcomes, efficient irrigation, crop choices aligned with basin realities and compliance in critical zones, we risk using renewable energy to accelerate permanent aquifer depletion. Energy policy is now water policy.
If the logic is this clear, why do we still stall? Because better governance and transparent accounting threatens those who benefit from opacity. Reliability at the tail threatens discretion and rent-seeking. Pricing threatens subsidies that have become political currency. And political leadership still gain prestige from ribbon-cutting on mega-projects, not the repetitive discipline of maintenance and enforcement. The result is drift: we underfund the basics, then act surprised when failure becomes normal.
The way forward must be one of principled pragmatism: clear outcomes, sequenced reforms and early wins that build trust. Make telemetry a national priority. Credible, shared measurement is the only defensible way to protect every province’s rightful share and reduce the politics of suspicion. Agree on standards, calibration, independent verification and public reporting so that disputes shift from ‘whose numbers’ to ‘which policy’.
Operationalise the 1991 Accord as an operating system, not a quotation. Publish allocation logic in plain language. Reduce discretion-by-ambiguity. Embed transparent stress-year rules that trigger by agreed thresholds, not political leverage.
Shift irrigation from projects to performance. Ring-fence maintenance budgets, adopt asset management, and publish service scorecards that reward reliability, especially at the tail end of canals. The cheapest “new water” Pakistan can access is the water it already diverts but loses or fails to deliver.
Govern groundwater urgently in critical zones. Use existing provincial laws to pilot controls where the aquifer is most stressed, with farmer engagement and transition support. Link all pumping support, solar finance and electricity relief to measurable efficiency outcomes. Subsidies without conditions are not compassion; they are delayed collapse.
Finally, activate oversight as routine governance, not emergency theatre. National coordination cannot remain ceremonial. The National Water Council must meet regularly, with clear targets, budgets, timelines, public reporting and consequences for non-performance.
Pakistan’s water future is not written in melting glaciers or erratic monsoons alone. It is written in institutional meeting minutes and political choices. We have the water, the policies, and examples of provincial progress. The question is whether we summon the courage to govern, to measure honestly, allocate transparently, maintain routinely and enforce consistently before aquifers pass the point of recovery and the next shock becomes existential.
For the tail-end farmer, another meeting is a wasted hour; they need the flow of the canal to match the promise of the calendar and the assurance that their land remains a future for their children. The urban resident needs a utility that renders the water tanker obsolete. Pakistan’s water future will be decided by honesty. Governance is a choice and, right now, the choice must be for the people.
The writer is a former Punjab minister for irrigation and finance, with extensive experience in Pakistan’s provincial and federal legislatures.
