Dismantling the Water Watchdog

Letting salinity eat up the land

There comes a point in the life of every institution when the hammer of so-called reform strikes not at inefficiency but at capacity, not at waste but at wisdom. The Punjab Irrigation Department stands at precisely such a juncture. Its Water Resources Zone— established in 2021, operationalised in 2022, and responsible for the only comprehensive groundwater monitoring regime in the province— now faces dissolution at the hands of a provincial administration bending to the IMF's structural adjustment diktats. The pretext is rightsizing. The reality is a self-inflicted wound that will bleed Punjab's water security for decades to come.

To grasp the sheer myopia of this decision, one must first understand what the Water Resources Zone actually does. Born from the revamping of the erstwhile Directorate of Land Reclamation— which has studied Punjab's groundwater since 2003— the zone was conceived as the department's scientific brain trust for subterranean water governance. Its survey wing conducts circle-level monitoring of groundwater levels and quality. Its salinity research wing analyses water-borne salinisation and bioremediation. Its chemist wing conducts quality assessments that determine whether water drawn from the depths is fit for irrigation or poison for the soil.

In 2025, the zone completed a landmark geo-referenced database project, enumerating and geo-tagging every tube well across Punjab using state-of-the-art mobile-based software. One cannot manage what one cannot measure— and the zone, for the first time in Punjab's history, provided the measuring tool.

But here lies the critical point that the bureaucratic axe-wielders appear unable or unwilling to comprehend: groundwater and surface water are not separate domains to be parcelled out to different departments like pieces of estate. They are two sides of the same coin, inextricably linked through the hydrological cycle that governs Punjab's entire agricultural edifice. The canal system— Punjab's surface water arteries— is operated by hundreds of civil engineers within the Irrigation Department. The aquifers underneath are monitored by the Water Resources Zone with barely a fifth of that manpower. When canal flows diminish, farmers turn to tube wells. When groundwater is over-extracted, the recharge relationship with surface water is disrupted.

The cultivators of Pakistan already draw 73 percent of their irrigation needs from groundwater and only 27 percent from canals. Sever the institutional nexus between the two, and you sever the province's ability to manage its water holistically. It is akin to separating the respiratory system from the circulatory, and expecting the body to survive.

Punjab's administrators would do well to remember that democracies are measured not by their compliance with external conditionalities but by their capacity to protect the public interest against the transient pressures of the moment. The IMF may demand rightsizing. Punjab's citizens deserve right-thinking. And right-thinking begins with keeping the water watchdog alive in Punjab Irrigation Department.

What makes this proposed dismantling even more indefensible is the disingenuousness of its premise. The zone is being judged as though it were a fully staffed, fully operational white elephant. It is nothing of the sort. Of its five mandated wings— survey, salinity, chemist, planning and development— only three are presently functional, manned by staff transferred from the erstwhile Directorate of Land Reclamation. The planning and development wing, which would provide the data analytics and policy framework essential for evidence-based water governance, remains unstaffed and un-operational. The top-to-bottom posts across all wings remain vacant, with stop-gap arrangements filling the breach.

The zone has produced extraordinary results— the geo-tagging project, the piezometer readings revealing alarming declines throughout the Punjab, the salinity assessments warning of secondary soil degradation— despite functioning at partial capacity. To assess its performance in this crippled state and declare it surplus is to condemn a runner for finishing late when his legs were tied at the start.

The timing and context of this manoeuvre betray its true provenance. Under relentless pressure from the IMF to reduce the public sector wage bill, Punjab's government has embarked on a frenzied campaign of departmental closures without the slightest discrimination between essential institutions and genuine white elephants. The Fund's programme design— already criticised for imposing the entire burden of fiscal adjustment on ordinary Pakistanis while giving extravagant government spending a free pass— has created a perverse incentive structure in which provincial administrators slash visible capacity to demonstrate compliance, regardless of the public cost. Since 2023, Pakistan has recorded the largest fiscal adjustment in its history, with 73 percent coming from revenue measures that have pushed 114 million citizens below the poverty line.

Yet the IMF has looked the other way as political patronage spending ballooned by 64 percent. Into this lopsided squeeze falls the Water Resources Zone— not because it is expendable, but because its destruction is administratively easy and politically costless. The brown sahibs of the secretariat, ever eager to please their external creditors, are offering up the province's water security on the altar of conditional compliance.

Let there be no ambiguity about who bears the cost of this folly. It is not the staff of the Water Resources Zone, though their livelihoods matter and their institutional memory is irreplaceable.

It is the 20 million smallholder farmers of Punjab who depend upon groundwater for three-quarters of their irrigation. It is the rural communities watching their water tables fall by half a metre every year while saline intrusion renders their lands barren. It is the next generation that will inherit an aquifer system depleted beyond recovery because the one institution tasked with monitoring and managing it was dismantled before it could even reach full strength. When the groundwater finally runs out— and at current extraction rates, 142 percent above natural recharge, that day is not distant— the farmers of Shujabad and Multan will not find solace in the knowledge that the IMF's targets were met.

A government that cannot distinguish between a dispensable appendage and a vital organ has no business wielding the scalpel of reform. The Water Resources Zone is not a burden on the exchequer; it is an investment in survival. To uproot it from the Irrigation Department and cast its staff as surplus to the Agriculture Department — as though water and irrigation were separate enterprises rather than a single continuum — is to demonstrate a profound ignorance of both hydrology and governance.

Punjab's administrators would do well to remember that democracies are measured not by their compliance with external conditionalities but by their capacity to protect the public interest against the transient pressures of the moment. The IMF may demand rightsizing. Punjab's citizens deserve right-thinking. And right-thinking begins with keeping the water watchdog alive in Punjab Irrigation Department.