Pakistan’s Farmers Are Running Out of Certainty

The country's most urgent water challenge may not be what happens across the border, but what happens after the water arrives.

Much of Pakistan’s water debate today is focused on India, the Indus Waters Treaty and upstream developments on the western rivers. These concerns are understandable and important. Water security matters. River regulation matters. The future of the Indus basin matters.

Yet this focus has also obscured a more immediate reality. Across Pakistan, farmers are increasingly relying on water sources that were originally intended to be backups. The country’s most pressing water challenge may not be what happens at the border, but what happens after the water enters Pakistan’s irrigation system.

For decades, while policymakers debated reservoirs, allocations and treaties, millions of farmers quietly adapted to an irrigation system that often struggled to provide predictable service. They invested their own money, drilled their own wells and created their own insurance against uncertainty. Today, Pakistan’s agriculture depends on groundwater on a scale unimaginable to the architects of the canal system.

The story is visible across the country. Punjab’s agricultural economy is sustained by hundreds of thousands of private tubewells. In many canal commands, groundwater has become the principal source of reliability while canals provide supplementary support. In Balochistan, decades of uncontrolled extraction have pushed water tables deeper and deeper underground, forcing farmers into an increasingly expensive race against depletion. Sindh continues to experience recurring disputes over shortages, rotations and tail-end deliveries, while farmers seek alternative sources whenever they can. In KP, dependence on local water resources and rainfall leaves many farming communities vulnerable to increasing climatic variability.

Different provinces face different hydrological realities, but farmers everywhere have reached remarkably similar conclusions: when certainty matters, they trust a pump more than a canal.

That should concern policymakers because groundwater was never supposed to become Pakistan’s primary irrigation shock absorber. The standard narrative about Pakistan’s water crisis focuses on scarcity. We are told that the country is running out of water, that storage capacity is inadequate, that irrigation efficiency must improve and that new infrastructure is urgently needed. There is truth in all these arguments. Yet they overlook a fundamental reality: farmers do not merely need water. They need water when their crops need it.

A wheat crop does not care about annual river flows. Cotton does not respond to provincial allocations. Rice does not read policy documents. Crops require water at specific stages of growth. Miss those windows and yields decline regardless of what annual statistics may show. For the farmer, reliability is often more important than aggregate volume. A farmer can adapt to scarcity. What he cannot easily adapt to is uncertainty.

This distinction exposes a weakness in how Pakistan approaches irrigation reform. Most reforms focus on infrastructure. Canals are rehabilitated, watercourses are lined, telemetry systems are installed and new policies are written. Many of these initiatives have genuine value. Yet they often share an implicit assumption: that better infrastructure automatically translates into better service.

The experience of many farmers suggests otherwise. A canal may be hydraulically efficient and still provide unreliable service. Water may be delivered according to engineering calculations while arriving too late for optimal crop growth. Official allocations may be respected while farmers remain uncertain about what they will actually receive. In short, it is entirely possible to manage water successfully while delivering an irrigation service that farmers do not fully trust.

This trust deficit helps explain one of the most remarkable features of Pakistan’s agricultural economy. Farmers continue investing billions of rupees in groundwater extraction despite rising energy costs, declining water tables and deteriorating groundwater quality. The answer is simple: groundwater offers something the surface irrigation system often struggles to provide—control. A farmer who owns a tubewell knows when water will arrive. A farmer dependent entirely on external decisions often does not.

For decades, this arrangement allowed Pakistan to postpone difficult reforms. Groundwater compensated for institutional weaknesses. Private investment compensated for unreliable service. Agricultural production continued growing and policymakers congratulated themselves on rising output. But survival should not be mistaken for sustainability. Groundwater levels are falling across large parts of the country, pumping costs continue to rise and water quality is deteriorating in many aquifers. The margin for inefficiency is shrinking.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that Pakistan does not suffer from a shortage of reform proposals. Water policies have been written. Master plans have been prepared. Donor-funded programmes have generated studies, models, strategies and recommendations. Technical solutions are well understood.

The problem is that irrigation systems are still largely managed as engineering enterprises rather than service-delivery institutions.

Success is typically measured in terms of volumes diverted, structures constructed and projects completed. Farmers measure success differently. They want to know whether water will arrive when promised, whether shortages will be communicated in advance and whether cropping decisions can be made with confidence. In other words, they judge the system not by how much water it moves, but by how reliably it performs.

This idea is hardly revolutionary. Irrigation agencies in countries as diverse as Australia, Spain, Mexico and parts of India increasingly focus on service quality alongside water allocation and infrastructure management. Their institutional arrangements differ widely, but the underlying principle is remarkably consistent: farmers value certainty as much as volume.

In Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, irrigation service providers operate in an environment where reliability of supply is explicitly recognised and communicated to water users. In Spain, modern irrigation communities place significant emphasis on predictable scheduling and transparent allocation. Mexico’s irrigation reforms similarly focused on improving accountability and operational performance at the level experienced by farmers. Even in West Bengal, reforms concentrated on improving measurable irrigation service while retaining public ownership of infrastructure and government control over water allocation. Farmers ultimately judged success not by engineering outputs but by whether water arrived when promised.

The lesson is not that Pakistan should copy any particular model wholesale. Pakistan’s irrigation history, institutional structure and political economy are unique. The failure of earlier participatory irrigation experiments in parts of the country demonstrates the dangers of elite capture, weak accountability and poor oversight. Imported solutions rarely survive contact with local realities.

The more useful lesson is narrower but potentially transformative: what gets measured gets managed.

If irrigation departments are held accountable primarily for infrastructure and water volumes, they will focus on infrastructure and water volumes. If they are held accountable for reliability, predictability and farmer satisfaction, institutional behaviour begins to change accordingly.

The logical starting point for reform is therefore to make reliability measurable. Irrigation departments should publish distributary-level service indicators, not merely flow data. Telemetry should be used to verify delivery performance rather than simply monitor volumes. Farmers should be able to compare promised supplies with actual supplies. Performance assessments should include predictability, timeliness and equity of delivery, particularly at the tail end of canal systems where confidence in public irrigation is often weakest.

Such a shift would not require new dams, new ministries or major legislative overhauls. It would require redefining success. Every distributary, canal division and irrigation command could be assessed against publicly reported service standards. Farmers would know what level of service they are entitled to expect. Canal Officers would know what outcomes they are expected to deliver. Performance could be monitored, compared and improved and rewarded.  During my tenure as Minister Irrigation a simple thing like giving appreciation certificates to top performers resulted in better delivery at the tail ends.

This may sound like an administrative reform. In reality, it is much more than that.

Pakistan’s groundwater crisis is, at least in part, a crisis of confidence. Every new tubewell represents a farmer’s attempt to purchase certainty when the irrigation system cannot provide it. The country has effectively allowed private groundwater extraction to become a substitute for public reliability.

That strategy is becoming increasingly unsustainable. The water tables are falling at an alarming rate.

For decades, farmers compensated for uncertainty by drilling deeper wells. The future cannot be built on ever-deeper pumps. Groundwater reserves are under pressure, and climate variability is increasing. The room for institutional inefficiency is shrinking.

Pakistan’s water debate often asks how much water the country possesses. The more important question is whether farmers can depend on receiving it when they need it.

Because Pakistan’s farmers are not running out of water first.

They are running out of certainty.

And unless reliability becomes the central objective of irrigation reform, no policy, programme or infrastructure project will be enough to secure the future of Pakistani agriculture.