Pakistan’s water future will be decided not only by how much flows down the Indus, but by what we pump, what we grow and how efficiently we use it. The World Resources Institute’s Aqueduct projections place Pakistan among countries facing extremely high water stress in 2050. In WRI’s terminology, that means annual withdrawals exceeding 80 percent of available renewable supply. The temptation is to read 2050 as a distant warning. But for Pakistan’s groundwater, much of that future is already visible today. Pakistan already faces extreme water stress. The significance of the projection is therefore not that it identifies a crisis waiting decades ahead. It is that an imbalance we already live with risks becoming progressively harder to manage.

Pakistan’s water debate is often reduced to two propositions: we need more storage, or we need better management. Both are true. Neither is sufficient. A highly seasonal river system does need more storage. But no reservoir can decide which crop is planted, prevent excessive groundwater pumping or protect an aquifer being drawn down faster than it can replenish. Storage is necessary. It is not a substitute for water management. The harder question is how much food, economic value and resilience Pakistan obtains from every cubic metre of water it already has. Groundwater brings that question into sharp focus. It has become Pakistan’s invisible reservoir, cushioning unreliable canal supplies and giving farmers greater control over irrigation timing.

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, in its Agricultural Census 2024, records 1,832,232 tubewells and lift pumps combined, including 912,327 solar-powered tubewells. The census is a 2024 snapshot. With solarisation continuing rapidly since then, the present number is likely higher, but until a newer national count is available, 912,327 remains the most defensible official figure. Even as a two-year-old snapshot, the figure makes the point: solar irrigation is no longer marginal. That matters because groundwater decline is largely invisible. When a reservoir empties, everyone can see it. An aquifer can decline farm by farm and year by year without generating the same political urgency.

Where pumping exceeds recharge, part of today’s agricultural output is being financed through depletion of a stored asset. We are treating stock as if it were flow, and natural capital as if it were income. Solar power has........

© The Friday Times