Hyderabad:

Several months of protests giving up every hook and corner of Sindh, eventually forced the provincial government to write a letter to convene the very delayed meeting of the Council for Common Interest (CCI) to discuss burning questions about channel construction.

Sindh Chief Secretary Asif Hyder Shah in a letter last week not only applied for a meeting in CCI, but also called for ‘canceling’ the water accessibility certificate issued by the Indus River System Authority (IRSA) to Cholistan Canal.

“Sindh province has serious reservations about the granting of the certificate of IRSA … as the case does not fall under the water trip to the Water Distribution Agreement, 1991, thus beyond the reach of IRSA,” he wrote. “It has become a proven fact that all provinces are currently suffering from acute water knob.”

He pointed out that Sindh, who was the lower ripar province, endures over 50 percent water shortage during the early Kharif sowing seasons. He referred to the data from IRSA itself, calculating a 16.6 percent water deficit across the country. “… Data clearly indicates that adequate water is not available in the system, so issuing the certificate to new channels is unjustified.”

CS referred to paragraph 14 (d) in the 1991 agreement to claim that while a province can ‘change’ the water share among existing channels, new duct systems cannot be built. According to him, Punjab already had the irrigation network capacity to draw water from the Indus River beyond its authorized share.

CS claimed that the aforementioned allocations can never be ascertained under the agreement until and unless the release of the river water towards the sea in the downstream Kotri barrier has been completed.

As a consequence, the river remains downstream kotri dry in most parts of the year and destroys the Indus Delta. “The new duct system cannot be designed on flood streams as these are uncertain,” Shah claimed. He compared figures from water discharge from 1976 to 1998 and from 1999 to 2022 to point out that the average annual discharge in downstream Kotri against the sea is reduced by 26.67 maf.

The Executive Committee of the National Economic Council had made it mandatory to seek approval from CCI from the Provinces of Irrigation Projects designed during the development of the National Irrigation Network for Green Pakistan Initiative at its meeting on February 7, 2024. “IRSA’s decision to issue NOC before the province’s consensus on the project and approval of CCI is also against the spirit of ECNEC’s decision.”