Settle the water first. Then redraw the map

Pakistan is debating new provinces again. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi says the four-province system has collapsed; former federal minister Muhammad Ali Durrani claims a constitutional amendment creating Bahawalpur and Hazara provinces will reach parliament as early as September. The prime minister’s adviser, Rana Sanaullah, concedes that no formula exists, as nobody has put a workable plan on paper.

Draw a new map, the argument goes, and better governance will follow.

But nobody drawing the map is drawing the water shares. Pakistan’s irrigation network was built as one hydraulic machine, the Indus Basin, in which a barrage in one proposed province feeds farms in another, and link canals carry water across every conceivable future boundary. New provinces would not merely redraw administration. They would carve up a single, interconnected water system without a single new rule for dividing it.

The 1991 Water Apportionment Accord is a compact among exactly four provinces: Punjab received 55.94 million acre-feet, Sindh 48.76 million acre-feet (which includes the sanctioned supply for metropolitan Karachi), and smaller allocations for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. It contains no allocation for Gilgit-Baltistan, Azad Kashmir or Islamabad, and no formula whatsoever for newcomers. Every new province would be born without an allocation of its own until the Accord is reopened. It is the only consensus on the Indus ever achieved, and the one document every stakeholder dreads touching.

Nowhere would this be harder than Punjab. If the province divides into a Lahore-centred unit, South Punjab and Bahawalpur, its 55.94 MAF must be re-cut among them, by historical withdrawals, population, cultivated area, command area, or backwardness? Each formula crowns a different successor. And the canal system refuses to cooperate with any of them. Balloki Headworks on the Ravi, a short drive from Lahore, controls the Lower Bari Doab Canal and the Balloki-Sulemanki Link that carry water to the Sutlej valley as far as Bahawalpur. Trimmu Barrage at Jhang regulates the Trimmu-Sidhnai Link feeding the Khanewal command. Furthermore, South Punjab’s groundwater is heavily depleted and increasingly saline compared to the sweet aquifers of central Punjab. This makes the region disproportionately dependent on surface canal water, especially during the Rabi season when rivers run low and water shortages actually occur. Consequently, South Punjab’s crops would depend entirely on gates held in Lahore.

Yet South Punjab would be no mere victim. At Taunsa, in Dera Ghazi Khan, it would hold the barrage that feeds the Taunsa-Panjnad Link, which terminates at Panjnad to help water Bahawalpur’s Abbasia and Panjnad canals, and the Kachhi Canal, designed to carry Indus water into Balochistan, whose command-area development has lagged years behind the main canal. The new province would be downstream at Balloki and Trimmu, and upstream at Taunsa: claimant and controller in the same week, demanding guaranteed releases from Lahore while Balochistan and Bahawalpur demand guaranteed releases from it. Reciprocity would be unavoidable; so would friction.

Bahawalpur is the most exposed unit of all. Its canal colonies are fed by the Sutlej headworks at Sulemanki, Islam and Panjnad, every one of them watered by link canals operated upstream, none of them fully under Bahawalpur’s own command. Because these barrages and link canals have always been provincial assets, dividing them means surgically dissecting long-held property, maintenance liabilities, and staff cadres. A province whose headworks hang from a three-link chain of other provinces’ gates needs what the Accord never imagined: legally guaranteed replacement supplies, shortage-sharing rules, and enforceable maintenance and flood schedules. Bahawalpur once held water rights of its own under the Sutlej Valley Project agreements. Restoring the state without restoring that water security would be an empty coronation.

Hazara raises the mirror-image problem. A Hazara province would host Tarbela, where the country’s largest storage sits astride the Haripur boundary, while inheriting none of the operating authority. Reservoir fill-and-release decisions, already contested between irrigation and power and between Punjab and Sindh, would gain a new claimant demanding a seat at the table and a share of hydel royalties.

Balochistan shows where all of this leads, because it already lives there. Its 3.87 MAF exists on paper; its grievance has always been delivery. Its Indus water arrives through canals that live in other provinces: the Pat Feeder off Guddu, which transits Sindh before reaching Nasirabad, and its Uch and Manuthy branches; the Kirthar off Sukkur, handed over at the Garang regulator; the Kachhi from Taunsa. Between the canal head and the Balochistan boundary lie losses, seepage and theft, and who owns those losses is precisely what remains unresolved. This is no hypothetical. Last December, Sindh approved telemetry gauges at Guddu, Sukkur, Kotri, Pat Feeder, Kirthar, Uch and Manuthy, and Balochistan flatly rejected the sites, insisting that releases be measured at points inside its own boundary. Two provinces cannot agree where to bolt down a gauge. What happens when there are six, and Taunsa, the Kachhi’s only source, answers to a government in Multan?

Sindh’s own division, if it ever came, would reproduce inside the province the very upstream-downstream conflict Sindh has fought with Punjab for a century. All three barrages, Guddu, Sukkur and Kotri, sit in the upper and central reaches, while Sukkur’s Rohri and Nara canals irrigate farmland hundreds of kilometres south of any plausible internal line. An urban or Karachi province would be starker still: a unit of some twenty million people with no barrage, no dam and no water allocation of its own. Karachi’s bulk supply travels the Kalri-Baghar Feeder off Kotri into Keenjhar Lake, with the barrage, canal and reservoir all in the territory of the rump Sindh, with Hub Dam, astride the Balochistan border, as the secondary source. And because the Accord counts Karachi’s sanctioned urban supply inside Sindh’s share, the new unit would not even hold a quota of its own: every drop would be gated by, and legally carved out of the entitlement of, the province it had just left, with the delta’s advocates bidding against it for the same water.

And below Kotri waits the weakest claimant of all: the delta. Roughly ninety per cent of the flow that escapes to the sea does so in the Kharif months; in Rabi, the river below the last barrage can dwindle to almost nothing, and seawater, dying mangroves and displaced fishing communities fill the void. Any new map must convert the delta’s needs into an enforceable seasonal obligation that survives every boundary change, because the delta cannot outvote anyone.

Nor is the Indus only an irrigation system; it is also a flood machine and a drainage network. The 2022 floods showed what embankment cuts and release decisions do when they cross jurisdictions: one province saves its bund by drowning a neighbour’s village. Saline drainage flows downhill along with everything else, and a new province may take the irrigation benefit while exporting its waterlogging and its effluent across a fresh border. Flood operations and drainage cost-sharing must be settled basin-wide, or every August will reopen the argument that every canal starts.

A genuine settlement would require, at minimum, five things. First, a supplementary accord allocating water to any new province before it is created, not after. Second, an IRSA rebuilt for the new map, as its one-member-per-province arithmetic and weak enforcement powers would collapse the moment membership grew. Third, a national telemetry framework measuring flows at provincial boundaries, with audited, public data. Fourth, operating rules and joint canal boards for works like the Pat Feeder and the Kachhi, treating barrages and link canals as basin assets rather than provincial property, with binding dispute timelines instead of open-ended bargaining. And fifth, honest accounting: surface shares alone mislead, since central Punjab’s sweet groundwater cushions shortages that Sindh’s saline aquifers and Balochistan’s deep water cannot, and a paper project like KP’s still-unbuilt Chashma Right Bank Canal is an entitlement, not infrastructure.

The amendment reportedly coming in September covers Bahawalpur and Hazara precisely because their boundaries are tidy, as nobody yet dares touch the maps where the canals argue back. That caution is wise, but it is not enough. Even the tidiest new province drinks. Until Pakistan writes the water clauses before it draws the borders, every new province will be born downstream of somebody else’s gate.