The 2025 floods claimed more than 1,000 lives across Pakistan and disrupted the lives of nearly seven million people.
Within months, the conversation had turned, as it always does, to the need for more dams and reservoirs to capture that water before it runs to sea. It is quite a familiar rhetoric. This has always overlooked a bigger, easier and far more immediate opportunity: the water we are already losing within our own farming and irrigation systems.
Pakistan’s per-capita water availability has fallen from roughly 5,000 cubic meters in 1947 to under 900 today, placing us firmly among the world’s water-scarce countries. That decline is well documented. But look at how much water we waste once it enters the system, and a different story emerges, one about management, not just scarcity.
Of the roughly 104 million acre-feet (maf) available for agriculture each year, Pakistan loses an estimated 50 maf between canal outlets and crop root zones, to seepage, evaporation, and runoff. The Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) has different studies that put basin-wide irrigation efficiency at just 35–40 per cent. Even at the farm level, where efficiency is somewhat better, roughly half of the water applied never benefits the crop as intended. Set that against actual agricultural demand, about 135 maf a year, and the shortfall comes to roughly 30 maf.
The lost water equivalent to the combined storage capacity of six or seven Tarbela Dams. Pakistan may be losing more water annually through inefficiency than it stands to gain from any single infrastructure project currently under discussion.
This matters because agriculture consumes over 90 per cent of the country’s freshwater and underpins both rural livelihoods and national food security. A leak in this system should not be viewed as a peripheral concern; rather, it represents the primary challenge, especially in the context of climate change.
For decades, Pakistani water policy has chased one goal: more supply. Bigger dams, bigger canals, bigger reservoirs. But the international evidence is fairly consistent: improving water-use efficiency usually delivers a better return than developing new sources. Recovering even a fraction of what’s lost on farms today would do more for water security than the next mega-project, while simultaneously easing pressure on rivers, reservoirs and groundwater.
Climate change makes this harder to postpone. Erratic rainfall, longer droughts, and more extreme weather are straining production even as demand continues to climb with population growth and urbanisation. Flood irrigation, still the default across most of the country, is increasingly difficult to justify. Precision tools exist and have been tested in Pakistan, quite recently: soil moisture sensors, IoT-controlled drip and sprinkler systems, real-time irrigation scheduling. Pilot programmes at the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, and PMAS Arid Agriculture University, Rawalpindi, have already proven the concept. What’s missing isn’t proof but scale.
Alongside surface losses, groundwater is quietly running down. As surface supplies grow less dependable, farmers have leaned harder on tubewells, and the rapid spread of solar-powered pumps – cheaper to run, easier to install – has made over-extraction easier too. Falling water tables and worsening groundwater quality are already being reported across large parts of the country, particularly in Balochistan. Groundwater has underwritten decades of largely unregulated agricultural growth. Without robust monitoring and regulatory mechanisms, the expansion of solar-powered tube wells could accelerate groundwater depletion, erode this critical buffer and leave no fallback resource during periods of water scarcity.
Related problems compound the picture: roughly 30 per cent of agricultural land already suffers from salinity and waterlogging, and water-intensive crops like sugarcane continue expanding in regions – southern Punjab, Sindh – that can least afford them. These need attention too.
Better irrigation tools mean little if the farmers who need them can’t afford them. Smallholders, the majority of Pakistan’s agricultural producers, face high upfront costs, limited access to credit and limited extension support. A drip system is irrelevant to a farmer who can’t finance it or maintain it.
This is where policy intervention is critically required. Targeted subsidies, farmer training, accessible financing, and stronger extension services would scale adoption from pilot projects to the national level. Bringing in private-sector partners such as agri-corporates, agritech startups and fintechs through service-provider models could extend these tools to smaller farms rather than leaving them for large commercial operations alone.
Pakistan does not need to choose between storage and efficiency, but it does need to treat them as equally urgent. The government’s own irrigation-efficiency targets under Vision 2025 have gone largely unmet, even as new dam proposals continue to dominate the national conversation and the budget. That balance needs to shift. A credible national push, with financing, farmer incentives, and measurable efficiency targets, could recover more usable water within a few years than a new dam will deliver within a decade of construction.
The most valuable water Pakistan has may not be groundwater, or waiting behind a dam not yet built. It is already moving through irrigation channels, disappearing before it reaches the crops that depend on it. Recovering it is one of the largest, cheapest and most immediate opportunities the country has – if policymakers choose to see it as a crisis worth acting on, not just another statistic in the water-scarcity-related reports.
The writer is a research fellow at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI). He posts on LinkedIn at: linkedin.com/in/dr-kashif-majeed-salik-610b6126. The views expressed are personal and do not represent those of the SDPI.
