After years of drought, the 2025 monsoon brought plenty. Pakistan’s reservoirs were full. Tarbela, Mangla and Chashma were filled close to capacity at the beginning of Kharif.
Still, the Indus River System Authority announced a shortfall of 8% for the Rabi season. The contradiction, full reservoirs and yet shortages, reveals Pakistan’s real water crisis. The problem is not scarcity but mismanagement. This is a crisis of government, not of hydrology, and it stems from the unfulfilled promise of the 1991 Water Sharing Agreement.
When the four provincial chief ministers signed the agreement 34 years ago, they were formulating a national strategy for water security. The document established a framework for governance of the Indus Basin through six interlinked principles: equitable allocations, profit sharing, resource development, ecological protection, provincial autonomy and operational discipline. The authors understood that while rivers would rise and fall, institutions could bring stability through predictable rules and shared responsibility.
§ 2 fixed provincial shares. § 4 established rules for sharing excess water. Clause 6 required new reservoirs. Paragraph 7 recognized the importance of environmental flows in protecting Sindh’s delta. Sections 8-12 gave the provinces the freedom to develop their own water resources. And clause 14(c) made irrigation the highest operational priority, stating that “the existing reservoirs will be operated on priority for irrigation in the provinces”. Food had to come before electricity production.
But over the years, only clause 2, the distribution table, has been the focus, often the cause of friction between the provinces. The rest is ignored. No major reservoirs have been built since Tarbela, and total storage capacity has fallen from about 20 maf (million acre-feet) to about 13.5 maf. Without further storage, the excess water cannot be collected or shared. Clause 4, intended to distribute abundance, is dormant.
Clause 7’s commitment to the Delta has been disregarded. Flows below Kotri have declined from about 50 maf at the end of the twentieth century to less than 20 maf today, and that too mainly in Kharif. For most of Rabi, the Indus below Kotri runs dry. Saltwater is invading mangroves and farmland, displacing fishing communities and turning one of South Asia’s richest ecosystems into a wasteland.
Clause 14(c), the irrigation priority guarantee, has fared no better. Tarbela’s tunnels and outlets are largely operated according to hydropower plans. For major works on tunnels, the full capacity of the dam cannot be released, even when it is full. In 2024-25, restrictions on Tarbela’s low-level business limited IRSA’s access to deep storage. Last year, similar operational constraints helped turn an expected shortfall of 16%-18% into sharper effects than headlines suggested, a pattern that threatens to repeat itself. Reservoirs widen while farmers at the ends of the canal wait for water. This is directly contrary to the intent of the agreement. When irrigation priority is changed, food security is put at risk.
An 8% deficit in Rabi may seem small, but its implications are dire. Wheat grown this season feeds 250 million Pakistanis. A lack of irrigation at sowing time means lower yields, higher prices and tighter food supplies months later. The system is technically capable of avoiding this outcome, but is not controlled to do so. Full dams have become symbols of opulence that hide management failure.
Pakistan does not suffer from water shortage. It suffers from poor governance and too little implementation. The 1991 agreement provided a comprehensive framework that, if followed, would have balanced competing needs and reduced the cycle of floods and droughts. The agreement gave the provinces considerable autonomy: Punjab and KP could build small dams under 5,000 acres without federal approval; Balochistan could develop the right bank independently; provinces could modernize canal networks with lined canals and precision irrigation to further stretch their allocations.
Yet this freedom has largely gone unused. Provincial governments have focused on demanding more water from the system rather than developing what they already have the right to develop independently. None of these mechanisms were activated together. The system was reduced to allocations on paper without the development architecture that made those allocations viable.
The pattern is repeated every year. Monsoon floods fill the dams, but much of the water flows unused to the sea. In winter, the inflow decreases and the system reports a shortage. Each cycle deepens provincial mistrust and erodes confidence in federal coordination. The agreement was to prevent this by institutionalizing cooperation rather than crisis management. It offered a path from ‘not enough water’ to ‘not enough governance’. And management can be arranged.
Implementing the spirit of the agreement now requires more political will than engineering skills. The framework already exists. What is needed is compliance. The Council of Common Interests should confirm irrigation priority under Section 14(c) and empower IRSA with operational oversight of Wapda’s reservoir discharges, ending the disconnect between allocation authority and operational control.
Federal and provincial governments must accelerate storage projects to regain capacity lost to silting. Ecological flows downstream of Kotri should be restored. Provincial irrigation departments must invest in small dams, modernization of canals and effective irrigation within their allocations. Real-time data on accesses and releases should be made public so that transparency replaces suspicion.
This year’s monsoons have given Pakistan an opportunity. Nature has done its part by filling the reservoirs. The question is whether governance will do its part. If the agreement is treated as a living framework rather than a relic, this Rabi season could mark a turning point. Three decades of experience have shown that Pakistan’s challenge is not how much water flows through the country’s rivers, but how it is managed. The agreement remains because it was built on consensus. The same consensus must now be used to implement it.
If Pakistan operationalizes the agreement as planned, this year of floods could become the basis for long-term stability. If not, full reservoirs will again yield empty canals and the country will once again learn that its true deficiency is not of water but of governance.
The author is a former Punjab Minister of Irrigation and Finance, with extensive experience in Pakistan’s provincial and federal legislatures.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Pakinomist.tv’s editorial policy.
Originally published in The News
