When Pakistan’s National Water Policy (NWP) was approved by the Council of Common Interests on April 24, 2018, it was sold as a watershed moment: a single national framework, signed off by the prime minister and all four chief ministers, meant to bring order to the Indus Basin. More storage, less waste, better data, realistic pricing, and a federal–provincial architecture strong enough to hold it all together.

Seven years on, as we enter the final stretch of its 2030 horizon, the test is simple: did Pakistan’s first-ever National Water Policy change how the state behaves, or did it just give us better language to describe the same drift?

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The policy’s own diagnosis was unusually blunt and still reads like a warning label. The Indus system receives roughly 135–140 million acre-feet (MAF) in an average year; about 104 MAF is diverted into canals, but only about an estimated 60 MAF reaches the farm gate. The missing, nearly half bleeds away inside the system through seepage, spills, illegal outlets, and sheer mismanagement. It also recorded that Pakistan stores only about 14 MAF, roughly 10% of annual flows leaving the country exposed to the swing between drought and deluge.

So the NWP did not pretend this was a minor tuning problem. It promised big things by specific deadlines: real-time telemetry for the Indus Basin “before the end of 2021,” a National Water Council (NWC) chaired by the prime minister to meet annually and keep the programme on track, and investment levels rising toward 20% of development spending by 2030, backed by an investment envelope of roughly Rs 3,066 billion by 2030.

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