On 19 October, the Establishment Division issued a notification extending Awais Manzur Sumra’s additional charge as Secretary of Water Resources for another three months. He already serves as Secretary of Climate Change and Environmental Coordination. The office of Pakistan’s Commissioner for Indus Waters, the country’s official representative on the Indus Waters Treaty with India, is also being held on an additional-charge basis by Syed Muhammad Mehar Ali Shah, a senior officer of the same ministry.

"Additional charge" is civil service shorthand for asking an officer who already holds one full-time post to run a second alongside it, usually for a few weeks while a regular appointment is made. Yet at a time when India has placed the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance, in plain terms, declared itself no longer bound by it, and the government calls that a threat to national security, Pakistan has neither a dedicated Federal Secretary for Water Resources nor a full-time Commissioner for Indus Waters. Both jobs are being performed as second jobs. There is nothing unlawful about such arrangements. But when a temporary bridge becomes the permanent road, it reveals priorities. These are not posts that can wait indefinitely.

Consider first the Secretary's office. Under the Rules of Business, the Secretary heads the Water Resources Division: major development projects, federal financing, and coordination with bodies such as WAPDA, which builds our large dams, and IRSA, which distributes river water among the provinces. His ministry is also the secretariat of the National Water Council, chaired by the Prime Minister, a body the 2018 National Water Policy requires to meet at least once a year. It met in October 2018. It has not met since. Climate change is a major portfolio in its own right. So is water. One officer now carries both, and temporary convenience cannot indefinitely substitute for the attention each deserves.

The Commissioner's office is the deeper wound, and its story is much longer. Pakistan has not had a regular, full-time Commissioner for Indus Waters since January 2018. What began that February as a three-month additional charge was extended by the Cabinet in 2020, despite the Cabinet's own directive that a regular appointment........

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