The Asian Development Bank (ADB) will provide $450 million for 'Punjab Irrigated Agricultural Development Sector Project (PIADSP)' from its Ordinary Capital Resources and Asian Development Fund during 2008-11, which is a major project that will require significant institutional change at the farmers, regional and provincial levels to enable the full benefits or the modernisation programme to be realised. According to official sources, it is also an important component of strengthening the water management capacity in Punjab needed to deal with both the existing and the emerging water management challenges. The overall economic performance of the project and the region are dependent on successful implementation of not only the engineering works but also appropriate institutional arrangements to support them in the future. According to an update study on Punjab Irrigated Agricultural Development Sector, the country is rapidly moving from water stressed to a water scarce country, which is largely based on increased population growth. It does not factor in the likely impacts of climate change or reduced access to ground water, said report. Study mentioned that the change could have a profound impact on the availability of both surface and ground water. There is clear evidence that the glaciers of the Indus have been in decline for a number of decades and one estimate predicts that they could be gone by 2035. The graph below indicates that we are already seeing an increase in Indus flows as a result of the melting glaciers releasing the waters they have had stored in addition to the annual rainfall. The assessment predicts, depending on the rate of global warming, that the increased flows will continue for a couple of decades followed by a rapid reduction in available flows. No information on the likely impact of increasing temperatures on the recharge to ground water has been located, but the impacts are likely to be significant. There is no functioning ground water management regime in the Punjab. There are over 48,000 private tube-wells in the project area and over 700,000 in the country. Irrigated agriculture depends on ground water for much of its production and provides flexibility in water use, which is not provided by the surface water system and is therefore, from a production viewpoint, a very valuable resource. There are a number of potentially serious groundwater management issue to be considered. When the aquifers filled over the last 50 years or so it brought salt to the surface creating a major land salinity problem. At a broad scale this threat has now largely been managed. In areas with brackish groundwater continual management will still be required. The potential now exists for lateral movement of brackish water to the sweat water aquifers with the potential to make existing sweat water aquifers unusable. The time to change a sweet water aquifer to a brackish aquifer is measured in years. However, the time to change a brackish aquifer back to a sweet water aquifer is measured in centuries. There are no formal conjunctive use policies in place or under development. Given the strong linkage between canal and on farm seepage on recharge to the aquifer system a conjunctive use policy is vital to ensure the integrity of the groundwater system. The drop in aquifer level also means that irrigators will be facing increasing cost of pumping and in some cases will need to upgrade the pumping plant to cope with the higher lifts. This will be out of the reach of many small farmers. Under the city of Lahore the aquifer has now dropped to 100 ft and is continuing to drop at 2 to 3 ft/yr. In the absences of a functioning Indus basin model assessments have been made that indicate that Basha will increase the safe yield by about 6 MAF. It is understood that this assessment has been undertaken using the historical flow record of over about 70 years. The storage, however, may be extremely valuable in redistribution of water volume within a year or between years and for irrigation and generation of power. Study report mentioned that the other major nature resource issue is sedimentation of the reservoirs. This means that all major storage works will have their active storage reduced over time. The implication of this is that Pakistan will have to invest in further storages just to maintain the status quo. STUDY OBSERVED THAT MANY AGENCIES WORK IN VARIOUS PARTS OF THE WATER SECTOR: -- No integrated water resources management strategy for Punjab has been designed to ensure that the efforts of the various agencies are directed to a common outcome; -- PIDA/IPD is seen as the lead authority but only manages part of the water regime; -- Large parts of what would normally be included in contemporary water resources management arrangements are not mandated and are not being done; -- No licensing system for water entitlements other than the warabandi system for the supply to irrigators is in place, whereby many irrigators have only recently discovered what their entitlements to canal water are following the transfer of irrigation management to FOs; -- Arrangement for rotation of channel supplies is not transparent and clouds the entitlements of individual irrigators; -- Sharing of water between canal commands has evolved over time but the arrangement to record those entitlements are not adequate although some steps are being taken to improve transparency through better monitoring and reporting. Copyright Business Recorder, 2008