LocationsBuilding Water Security Through Integrated Governance
By Mohsin Leghari | Former Provincial Minister of Punjab for Irrigation
At its core, water governance is the social contract in action: a set of enforceable promises between the state and its citizens, and among federating units, on how a shared resource will be measured, allocated, and managed for collective benefit.
Pakistan does not lack water as commonly perceived; it lacks governance. That distinction reshapes both the diagnosis and the remedy. At its core, water governance is the social contract in action: a set of enforceable promises between the state and its citizens, and among federating units, on how a shared resource will be measured, allocated, and managed for collective benefit. When that contract holds, water underwrites cooperation and prosperity. When it breaks, scarcity becomes political, institutions lose legitimacy, and water turns into a trigger for grievance, mistrust, and conflict.
The Indus Basin receives approximately 135-140 million acre-feet annually from rainfall, glacial melt, and transboundary flows. Yet, Pakistan stores barely 30 days of supply—just about 10 percent of annual flows against a global average storage of around 40 percent. When seasonal abundance meets structural incapacity, the result is predictable: floods in summer, shortages in winter, and perpetual inter-provincial tension.
The 1991 Water Apportionment Accord was designed to meet this challenge head-on. Signed by the four provincial chief ministers, it was, in effect, a social contract among federating units—a commitment to share not only water, but the responsibility of governing it. The Accord set out an integrated framework: fixed allocations (Clause 2), surplus sharing (Clause 4), new storage commitments (Clause 6), environmental flows below Kotri (Clause 7), provincial autonomy for water development (Clauses 8-12), and interim operating rules for system regulation (Clause 14). Had these pillars been implemented as intended, Pakistan would have built a resilient governance architecture for managing climate stress. Instead, for over three decades, implementation has been reduced largely to the arithmetic of shares, while the rest of the Accord has remained under-enforced and under-delivered.
Consider the consequences. Clause 6 recognized the need for new reservoirs to stabilize supply, yet no major new storage has been commissioned since Tarbela (1976). Incremental additions such as the Mangla raising have not even kept pace with capacity lost to sedimentation. Clause 4 set a surplus-sharing formula, but without sufficient storage and flood-retention capacity, wet-season surpluses cannot be captured and routed productively. Clause 7 acknowledged the need for environmental flows below Kotri to protect the Indus Delta; in recent decades, releases have often remained well below historical levels. The costs are cumulative and irreversible: coastal livelihoods are disrupted, food security is undermined, and climate vulnerability deepens.
What explains this selective implementation? Governance failures have hardened into institutional gridlock. The Accord was built on consensus, but that consensus never matured into coordinated execution. The Council of Common Interests (CCI), constitutionally mandated to uphold inter-provincial agreements, has not been consistently mobilized to enforce the Accord’s non-allocation commitments. The Indus River System Authority (IRSA), established under Clause 13, still operates without independent measurement capacity. Provinces largely self-report withdrawals, and disputed data predictably produces disputed politics. The result is a revealing paradox whereby every province believes it is being short-changed. All cannot be right, yet in the absence of verifiable facts, no claim can be conclusively tested. This collapse of shared evidence is the trust deficit driving Pakistan’s water disputes.
The governance gap is most visible in basic water accounting. System-wide losses, often estimated at 15-20 percent, remain effectively untracked. Water appears to ‘disappear’ between gauging points without a credible, agreed explanation. Whether these volumes reflect measurement error, unmeasured abstraction, seepage, or evaporation is precisely the problem. Pakistan lacks a basin-wide accounting system capable of tracing flows transparently from source to delivery. In the absence of independent verification, disputes over who gains and who loses cannot be settled, and the losses persist. Downstream, inefficiency compounds the damage: The Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) and International Water Management Institute (IWMI) studies suggest that nearly half the water diverted into canals fails to reach the farm gate, drained away through seepage, weak maintenance, and outdated application practices.
Photo Credit: Lums.edu.pk
Governance failures have hardened into institutional gridlock. The 1991 Water Apportionment Accord was built on consensus, but that consensus never matured into coordinated execution.
The Way Forward
Building water security demands progress on multiple fronts, at the same time. First, transparency must replace contested claims. Independent telemetry under neutral oversight, accessible to all provinces and the public, would shift debate from accusation to evidence and bring the ‘missing water’ into view. Second, the Accord’s dormant provisions must be put back to work: renewed consensus on storage under Clause 6, binding operational protocols for environmental flows under Clause 7, and explicit shortage-sharing rules tied to reservoir levels. Third, institutions must be equipped to implement what the law already envisages: IRSA with credible enforcement and independent verification, the CCI functioning as an implementation engine, and parliamentary committees exercising constitutional oversight. Fourth, efficiency must become a national priority: canal rehabilitation, watercourse improvement, and modern application methods can recover millions of acre-feet each year, without building a single new dam.
Photo Credit: Irrigation Department, Punjab
The 1991 Accord is not outdated; it remains an untapped solution to Pakistan’s water challenges. The Indus Basin can meet national needs, but only if its resources are managed through transparent, accountable, and integrated institutions. Water security now depends on completing the structure the Accord’s framers envisaged, honouring the social contract that binds the federation—not merely dividing water, but governing it together.