Media Type

Article

Publication Date

5-14-2018

Description

First of all thank you for providing this opportunity to share my views about the National Water Policy. I would like first to commend the Prime Minister and Chief Ministers for bringing to fruition an exercise which has been going on and pending for 16 years. I remember when I was in the government in 2002 we started this process of formulating a National Water Policy but it never saw the light of day so this government and the chief ministers deserve our commendation for bringing this to a point where we can have a policy on which we can debate, discuss, propose suggestions and carry forward. The second feature of this policy which strikes me as positive is the agreement among all the provinces on the need for storage .This has been a very contentious issue in Pakistan so for the first time there is a consensus on the need for establishing water storage reservoirs which will regulate the flows to regulate intra-year variations in the water availability . That is something which I feel is very much desired as it will provide the necessary impetus for accelerating the work on storage dams. These don’t have to be large dams. The World Bank experts have suggested that we can have run- of- the river dams also which are not really storage dams but they are trying to regulate and calibrate the flows during the heavy season and lower season. So I won’t go into that because I’m not an expert. What I would do next is to raise a few reservations which I think need to be taken into consideration for what I call as the operationalization of this policy. My first reservation is that this policy has 37 objectives. In public policy literature and practice, each objective requires a policy instrument; otherwise these objectives remain hanging too much up in the air without any anchors. The document does not spell out the specific instrument which maps out against each objective. And that work has to be carried forward to make this policy more operationally relevant. The document chooses the right jargon, pays lip service to integrated water resource management and it flags the priorities and the planning processes. But we all know that integrated management can not take place unless the challenges of segmentation and allocation of water at the transboundary level, between the upper and riparian provinces, and at the individual consumer level are explicitly addressed and consensus reached to adjudicate the competing claims of the various contending parties at each stage.

Notes

Remarks made at the Roundtable on National Water Policy organized by the Civil Society Coalition for Climate Change (CSCCC) at Islamabad on May 14, 2018

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