August 24, 2026
By Xari Jalil
LAHORE
Amid mounting public panic over impending water scarcity, leading environmental lawyer and activist Ahmad Rafay Alam offers a stark re-evaluation of Pakistan’s water crisis: the nation is not simply running out of water; it is suffering from a crisis of misallocation, institutional exclusion, and systemic injustice.
Speaking during a detailed session for the Water and Governance Series curated by international law scholar Maham Naweed, Alam delivered harrowing insights into how traditional water management frameworks systematically disenfranchise marginalized communities, perpetuate land-linked feudal entitlements, and erase women from policy decisions.
The illusion of scarcity vs. The reality of misallocation
The discussion highlighted that for years, policy rhetoric has warned of a looming existential threat, forecasting that rising temperatures, retreating glaciers, and dwindling groundwater will soon leave Pakistan parched. However, Alam directly critiques this ‘sensationalism’, pointing out that public perception is often decoupled from actual hydro-data.
“There is a lot of scaremongering that we are running out of water, which is not entirely true… What is really happening is that we are misusing and misallocating this resource. People not having access is different to running out of it.”
The environmental lawyer and activist said that rather than physical exhaustion of the resource, the crisis stems from unsustainable economic production and inequitable distribution. There is the virtual water trade/export where millions of liters of water are diverted into water-intensive cash crops like sugarcane and cotton, or heavy meat production, prioritizing luxury consumption in urban centers like Lahore and Karachi, while agricultural and rural communities in regions like South Punjab struggle for basic drinking water.
Then there is the situation of commodity footprints. Alam highlighted that a single lawn fabric suit requires between 8,000 to 10,000 liters of water to produce—an unchecked expenditure of blue water resources in a region where smallholder farmers face severe canal delivery deficits.
Land rights as a proxy for water rights
A central theme of the discussion was the structural violence embedded in existing legal frameworks governing water distribution. In Pakistan’s agricultural heartland, water rights are historically tied directly to land ownership.
Because water allocations are tied to land acreage via canal irrigation quotas (the warabandi system), landless agricultural laborers, tenant farmers, and indigenous communities are legally invisible in water governance.
This structural proxy creates severe disparities.
Communities living along riverbeds and canal tails are denied formal water entitlements, forcing them to rely on contaminated groundwater or expensive private water tankers. This is called the landless burden.
Technocratic Dominance: Meanwhile, water management bodies—such as the Indus River System Authority (IRSA) and provincial irrigation departments—are overwhelmingly run by civil engineers, hydrologists, and technocrats who treat water as an engineering commodity rather than a human right.
Gender Erasure in National Policy
Addressing the gendered impact of water mismanagement, the discussion highlighted a glaring omission in national policy frameworks.
Despite women bearing the primary burden of domestic water collection, household sanitation, and a vast portion of agricultural field labor, they remain excluded from decision-making spaces.
Alam issued a sharp critique of the National Water Policy. “While everyone knows women interact with water as much as men, the policy is absolutely silent as to the role of women in the water sector,” he said. “Pakistan’s policy space and practice areas in water are entirely male-dominated… There is no female representation in this space, nor an adequate female presence in public sector institutions.”
He said that this absence leads to infrastructure designs and policy measures that fail to address the health, safety, and economic security of rural women who spend hours daily navigating water transportation.
Structural reforms needed in water governance
| Area | Current Approach | Proposed Legal & Policy Reform |
|---|---|---|
| Rights Basis | Tied to land title (Warabandi system) | Decoupled water rights centered on the fundamental Human Right to Water |
| Inclusivity | Technocratic (engineers, hydrologists) | Interdisciplinary boards incorporating community leaders, women, and legal experts |
| Resource Focus | Mega-infrastructure & storage | Demand-side management, crop rationalization, and groundwater protection |
| Gender Policy | Absent / silent | Mandated gender quotas in Farmer Organizations and Irrigation Authorities |
To move away from crisis-driven, technocratic responses—such as ad-hoc dam construction funds—the discussion outlined urgent structural priorities for equitable water governance:
Re-centering marginalized voices
The session curated by Maham Naweed underscores a growing consensus among international legal experts and civil society practitioners: technical solutions alone cannot solve Pakistan’s water crisis.
Until governance structures disassemble the historical nexus between land ownership and water access, and actively incorporate marginalized, female, and climate-vulnerable voices into policy creation, the country’s water distribution will remain an instrument of socioeconomic inequality.