PAKISTAN’S water crisis is often framed in terms of scarcity. Increasingly, it is also a crisis of contamination. Irsa’s warning about deteriorating water quality in the Indus Basin Irrigation System is worrying in terms of the impact on public health, agriculture and food security. When rivers carry untreated waste, salinity rises and lakes become unfit even for irrigation, the damage reaches far beyond the water sector. The signs are troubling. The Ravi and Sutlej in eastern Punjab are reported to be severely polluted. In........

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