At the farm gate, a government demand notice never arrives as an economic theory. It arrives as another bill.

That is why Punjab’s revised abiana is already beginning to provoke the anger one would expect. The government can argue, correctly, that canal irrigation cannot be maintained on symbolic charges forever. Farmers can reply, equally correctly, that this is a brutal year in which to ask them for more. The real debate lies between these two truths.

Under the Punjab Irrigation, Drainage and Rivers Act 2023, the flat assessment now stands at Rs 1,650 per acre for kharif and Rs 850 per acre for rabi, with further annual charges on sanctioned garden supplies and state-owned lift irrigation. The new schedule supersedes the crop-based one before it. The quarrel that has followed is over whether water should cost more. On that, the serious answer has always been yes. The real questions are how this increase has been structured, when it has been imposed, and whether the money will return to the system from which it is collected.

Take the principle first, because it is sound and deserves defending. Punjab runs one of the largest contiguous irrigation systems in the world. It is not a minor departmental service but one of Pakistan’s most valuable public assets. It supports wheat, rice, cotton, sugarcane, maize, fodder, vegetables, fruit, livestock, agro-industry and exports. It also recharges groundwater across vast areas. Much of what is called Punjab’s agricultural economy rests on this network of barrages, headworks, link canals, main canals, distributaries and minors.

Canal water is not free merely because the river is natural. The system that diverts, regulates, carries and delivers it is built infrastructure. It has masonry, steel, earthworks, gates, regulators, gauges, outlets, embankments and thousands of kilometres of public works. It silts up, cracks, corrodes and weakens. A barrage does not become safer because the budget is politically convenient. A distributary does not desilt itself because farmers are poor. A canal gate does not repair itself because governments are afraid of rural backlash. If the system is not maintained, the cost does not disappear. It returns as unreliable water delivery, breaches, emergency repairs, groundwater pumping and farmer distrust.

So the principle of higher abiana should not be rejected out of hand. Even at the revised rate, canal water remains far cheaper than the diesel or electric pumping a farmer turns to when the canal fails him. That is the truest measure of its worth. Anyone insisting the rate should never have risen is arguing with........

© The Friday Times