Irrigation Water Shortage Feared in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD - Mar 4/02 - IRIN -- Water levels at the Tarbela dam, 60 km west of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, are sinking fast, raising fears of a serious water shortage in the country this year, officials told IRIN on Monday. "We have not had the expected rain and snowfall," the deputy director of Pakistan's ministry of water and power, Rashid Ali, said.

The dam, which supplies water mainly for irrigation in the Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan and North West Frontier provinces, is currently being depleted at the rate of about half a metre a day. "It could reach the dead level in a few days' time," Ali said. Some 25,000 cusecs (one cubic foot per second) of water were being released to the provinces from Tarbela every 10 days, compared to an inflow of just 12,200 cusecs, he explained.

The water level at the dam stood at 1,374.25 feet as of 2 March, not far from the 1,369 dead-level mark. "Once we reach the dead level, then we will only release water equivalent to that of the inflow," Ali warned, saying that the Punjab and Sindh provinces would be prioritized, as their agricultural needs were greater.

The problem of water shortages has been long running in Pakistan. In the port city of Karachi in the southern Sindh Province, some four million people were left without access to clean drinking water last year due to a three-year cycle of drought. Meanwhile, in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, water levels in underground aquifers were dropping at the rate of 3.5 meters annually, and would run out in 15 years, experts warned.

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