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Mohsin LeghariProfit |
When flour becomes expensive, governments convene meetings. Stocks are released, subsidies announced and officials instructed to bring prices down....
Before they commit their money and labour to another crop, the government should answer a question left unsettled by the last harvest: will the...
On 19 October, the Establishment Division issued a notification extending Awais Manzur Sumra’s additional charge as Secretary of Water Resources for...
For thousands of years, the Indus decided when the fields of Sindh would receive water. On 13 January 1932, men gathered at Sukkur to announce that...
The grain is counted when it leaves the field. Hunger is counted when it reaches the child. Between those two measurements lies much of Pakistan’s...
The Federal Committee on Agriculture met in Islamabad this month and confirmed what the fields had already announced. Cotton production in 2026-27 is...
Pakistan can put a dollar figure on wheat cargo. It is much less willing to put an economic cost against the water decisions that help determine...
There is something extraordinary about an ordinary canal bridge in Punjab. A tractor rumbles across, a motorcyclist sounds his horn, and perhaps a...
On 12 April 1926, a gathering assembled on the banks of the Sutlej to witness the opening of Sulemanki Headworks. Sir Malcolm Hailey, Governor of...
In the next few weeks, ships carrying imported wheat will begin arriving at Pakistani ports. At almost the same time, farmers across Punjab and Sindh...
Pakistan has a new roadmap for water security. The Planning Commission’s National Water Security framework under URAAN Pakistan is ambitious: by...
Two of the world’s most intensively managed river basins are confronting versions of a problem Pakistan can no longer postpone. In the American...
At the end of the nineteenth century, the tract that would become Lyallpur district was still sparsely populated. Within a generation of the arrival...
For decades, Pakistan has asked the wrong questions about its agriculture. How much wheat did we grow? How many bales of cotton? How many tonnes of...
The Colorado River crisis carries a warning for Pakistan: allocating water is not the same as governing scarcity. The Colorado River is running short...
Follow a drop of water in Pakistan, from glacier to reservoir, through barrage and canal, into an aquifer, across a farm and through a city....
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....
Pakistan is debating a new constitutional order as if water will adjust afterwards. It will not. In 1947, the Radcliffe Line was drawn across Punjab...
In the early hours of 10 August, after days of rapid filling, Tarbela touched its maximum conservation level of 5.58 million acre-feet. Mangla, on the...
On 30 July 2026, Federal Minister for Planning Ahsan Iqbal announced that the National Flood Protection Plan would be placed before the Council of...
By late July 2026, according to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), the monsoon that had begun just weeks earlier had already claimed...
Last week the Food Security Minister announced that Pakistan would import wheat. The decision was presented as market stabilisation. It is better...
In late July 2026, the Ravi and Chenab are again testing the limits of everything built along their banks. At Abdul Hakeem, the Ravi is taking in far...
More than three thousand years ago, the poets of the Rig Veda imagined the Indus Basin differently. In the Nadi Sukta, the Hymn of the Rivers, they...
Indian Punjab has unintentionally conducted two experiments. One demonstrates that a neglected canal system can be restored to life. The other...
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...
Punjab has revised its water rate, and the argument it has set off is the wrong one. Under the Punjab Irrigation, Drainage and Rivers Act 2023, the...
Every government likes to build. A new building earns a ribbon-cutting ceremony. A new bridge becomes a headline. A new hospital is hailed as a symbol...
Pakistan's water debate has become increasingly focused on India. The reasons are understandable. Indian leaders have openly questioned the...
Every section of Pakistan's water crisis has a known technical solution. Every one of those solutions has been blocked not by engineering failure...
The court ruled. The gates didn't. When I wrote about the Chenab last month, the argument was still partly inferential. The Marala hydrograph for...
I have written about the Chenab's pulses, the sharp surges and sudden troughs that turn a Himalayan river into a regulated instrument. Those...
The farmer does not leave wheat out of sentiment. He leaves when the arithmetic forces him to. In Okara, in Sahiwal, and in parts of Bahawalpur and...
Pakistan treats wheat procurement as a provincial matter. The market does not. A procurement failure in Punjab travels. It moves through flour prices...
Every policy distributes risk. Punjab's wheat transition was presented as a technical reform: reduce fiscal exposure, expand private...
Governments often imagine that reform begins when a policy is announced. In commodity markets, reform begins much later: when banks decide whether to...
On the first of April, in Haroonabad, the wheat was ready. The harvesters had moved through the fields. Grain bags were stacked along the roadside....
For more than six decades, one of the world's most unlikely diplomatic achievements quietly endured between two nuclear-armed states that have...
Punjab’s wheat harvest is laying bare a policy transition that may have made fiscal sense on paper, but has been badly handled in practice. The...
When the cloudbursts struck Buner in August 2025, thirty-six members of one family retreated to what they believed were safe rooms. The NDMA red alert...
Faisal, a rice farmer in Hafizabad, does not know that a courtroom in The Hague matters to him. The farmers in Faisalabad, whose wheat crop depends on...
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