Pakistan’s agriculture sector, which consumes over 90 per cent of the country’s available water, is becoming increasingly dependent on groundwater due to multiple factors, including declining river flows, erratic rainfall, expansion of water-intensive rice and sugarcane crops, increased cropping intensity, and more recently, the widespread adoption of solar-powered tubewells that offer minimal operating costs, which encourages indiscriminate pumping of groundwater.

Nowhere is this shift more evident than in Punjab, which accounts for nearly 75pc of the country’s total cropped area. The number of agricultural tubewells in the province has soared from 333,881 in 1994 to over 1.2 million in 2024. District Rahimyar Khan leads with 97,571 tubewells, collectively extracting around 4m acre-feet (MAF) of groundwater annually — a figure largely explained by the district’s extensive sugarcane cultivation.

Collectively, Punjab’s tubewells now withdraw over 51 MAF of groundwater annually — an amount slightly less than Punjab’s entire allocated share of river water under the 1991 Water Apportionment Accord. Yet, due to higher losses in canals and watercourses, farmers receive significantly less water at the farm gate, making overall groundwater the dominant source of irrigation.

Over-reliance on underground water reserves are pushing Punjab’s water tables towards a crisis that may be overcome via check dams and rainwater harvesting

But this over-reliance is pushing Punjab’s underground water reserves to the brink of a........

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