IT is a crisis rarely noticed until floods strike or droughts become impossible to ignore.

The Asian Development Bank’s latest water outlook for Pakistan reads like a medical report on a chronically unwell patient insisting everything is fine. Per capita water availability has fallen from 3,500 cubic meters in 1972 to around 1,100 in 2020, over 80 per cent of Pakistanis lack safe drinking water and more than $12 billion is needed to meet basic UN targets. Numbers, however, conceal daily struggles: women in rural Sindh and the hills of Kashmir walk long distances for water that may still sicken their children; farmers in Punjab drill ever deeper as the water table drops; Karachi residents rely on tanker mafias for deliveries. Chronic shortages, contamination and mismanagement persist, yet attention spikes only during disasters, leaving the underlying crisis largely ignored. None of this is new.

Every few months another report confirms what we already know. We are running out of water, much of what remains is contaminated and we are not responding with any sense of urgency. Between 2013 and 2025, rural water security stayed under pressure, urban water security improved only slightly, environmental water security declined and our ability to manage water-related disasters barely changed. In other........

© Pakistan Observer