Balochistan’s ancient karez system kept the province alive through centuries of drought. Unregulated tube wells are finishing it off in a generation.

A Vanishing Water Legacy

In the valley of Mastung, just an hour’s drive away from Quetta, old farmers still recall that they used to count karez names just like others count the number of their relatives. There were 365 of them, stretching underground in the valley. Each karez was an artificially created channel on a gentle slope to transfer groundwater to the fields without even a single machine or drop of diesel fuel. At present, only about a dozen of them are functional. The rest of them lie idle, with their vertical shafts slowly collapsing into the ground.

This is not just about one valley but about Balochistan’s oldest operating technology, older than any road, dam, and even some of the province’s history, which has been left to go extinct while it is still remembered.

How the Karez System Works

The karez, otherwise known as the qanat in other arid regions, is a wonderful example of a low-tech engineering feat. It involved sinking a “mother well” in an aquifer at the foot of a hill or mountain and then excavating a tunnel from there over a distance of a few hundred metres or more, which would allow the water to flow out of the daylight opening at the bottom end of the tunnel, using gravity only. Traditionally, a certain buffer area around the mother well, usually about a few hundred metres, was supported by tribal agreement as off-limits for any excavation in order not to stress the source too much.

The Wells That Changed Everything

It was not just the drought that broke the system. People in Balochistan have been facing the drought for hundreds of years,........

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