Swallowed by the sea, Pakistan’s Indus delta now threatened by canals

A boat is being unloaded and another is about to depart for the Arabian Sea on a sunny afternoon at Dando Jetty, a small fishing village in Pakistan’s sprawling Indus Delta.

The melodious voice of Sindhi folk singer Fouzia Soomro rises from a loudspeaker playing on a nearby parked boat.

The Dando Jetty, located in Thatta, a coastal district in eastern Sindh province, is located about 130 kilometers (81 miles) from Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, on the banks of Khobar Creek, one of the two still-existing Indus River creeks.

“There should be freshwater in this creek, flowing into the sea,” Zahid Sakani tells Al Jazeera as he embarks on a boat to visit his ancestral village, Haji Qadir Bux Sakani, in Kharo Chan, a sub-district of Thatta, three hours away. It’s seawater, not the opposite. ”

Six years ago, Sakani, 45, used to be a farmer. However, his land and the rest of Haji Qadir Bux Sakani’s village were destroyed by the sea, making him flee to Baghan, which is 15 kilometers (nine miles) away from Dando Jetty, and engage in survival-oriented tailoring.

Now, the Kharo Chan port wears a deserted look – no human beings in sight, stray dogs roam freely, and abandoned boats outnumber those that are still in service. Sakani occasionally visits his father’s and other ancestors’ graves in Kharo Chan.

“We cultivated 200 acres [81 hectares] of land and raised livestock here,” said Sakani as he stood at the port. However, the sea threw everything away. ”

Only three of the 42 “dehs” (villages) that are still in existence today make up Karo Chan, which was once a prosperous region. The rest were submerged into the sea, forcing thousands of people to migrate to other villages or Karachi city.

Population in Kharo Chan decreased from 26,000 in 1988 to 11,403 in 2023, according to the government census.

It was not only Kharo Chan that met this fate. Difficulty villages in the Indus Delta have vanished in the past ten years and been completely destroyed by the current sea.

New canal projects

And now, an already fragile ecosystem is threatened even more.

As part of a so-called Green Pakistan Initiative, the Pakistan government is seeking $6bn investment from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain over the next three to five years for corporate farming, aiming to cultivate 1. The existing 50 million acres (20 million hectares) of agricultural land in the country will be mechanized by 5 million acres (600,000 hectares) of barren land.

The project aims to irrigate a total of 4. 8 million acres (1. 9 million hectares) of barren land by constructing six canals – two each in Sindh, Balochistan, and Punjab provinces. The sixth canal will be constructed along the Sutlej River to irrigate the Cholistan Desert in Punjab province, Pakistan’s most populous province, while five of those five will be on the Indus.

According to the 1960 Indus Water Treaty, a World Bank-brokered water distribution agreement between India and Pakistan, the waters of the Sutlej primarily belong to India. One of the five rivers that flows into Pakistan’s Indus River from India, this one. Along with the Sutlej, the waters of the Ravi and Beas Rivers also belong to India under the treaty, while the waters of the Chenab and Jhelum, apart from Indus itself are Pakistan’s.

Although Cholistan has historically relied on rain for irrigation, the Sutlej do bring water to Pakistan during the monsoons in India.

“They will divert water from Indus to Sutlej through Chenab and then to Cholistan canal,” said Obhayo Khushuk, a former irrigation engineer. According to [monsoon] floodwater, a new irrigation system cannot be constructed. ”

Meanwhile, corporate farming has already begun in Cholistan under the Green Pakistan Initiative, with the authorities approving 4,121 cusecs of water to irrigate 0. The Cholistan Desert, which is Pakistan’s second-largest city, has 6 million acres (24,000 hectares) of land.

Mohammad Ehsan Leghari, Sindh’s representative in the Indus River System Authority (IRSA), a regulatory body established in 1992 to oversee the allocation of water to Pakistan’s four provinces, strongly opposed the move.

No year in Pakistan has gone by since 1999, when Sindh and Balochistan provinces have experienced up to 50% water shortages during the summer. In this situation, where will the water for the proposed canal system come from? He inquired.

In a letter to the Council of Common Interest (CCI), a constitutional body authorised to resolve issues between the federal government and provinces, the Sindh government also criticised the project, saying that IRSA had no right to issue certificates of water availability. The members of CCI include the three federal ministers and the chief ministers of the four provinces.

Sindh’s Irrigation Minister Jam Khan Shoro warned the Cholistan canal would “turn Sindh barren”. Federal Planning and Development Minister Ahsan Iqbal, who cited the lack of water resources in the Sindh government, saying the government’s objections were “baseless.”

But Hassan Abbas, an Islamabad-based independent water and environment consultant, calls the Cholistan canal an “unscientific” project. He believes that even steady land is required to build a canal system, not the sand dunes that are present in Cholistan.

“Water does not know how to climb a sand dune,” Abbas said.

The delta was destroyed

The mighty Indus River has been flowing for thousands of years and once cradled one of the earliest known human civilisations spread across modern Pakistan, Afghanistan and India.

However, as British colonists of the subcontinent came to power, they also created dams and adversities along the river. After independence in 1947, the same colonial policies were followed by successive governments, as more barrages, dams and canals led to the destruction of the Indus Delta – the fifth largest in the world.

Sand, silt, and water make up a delta. The process of the destruction of the Indus Delta began back in 1850 when the Britishers established a canal network. According to Abbas, every canal constructed in Pakistan, India, or China has contributed to the Indus Delta’s destruction. The Indus originates from the Chinese-controlled Tibet region, where China has built a dam on the river.

According to a 2019 study by the US-Pakistan Center for Advanced Studies in Water, the Indus Delta was spread over 13,900 square kilometres (5,367sq miles) in 1833, but shrunk to just 1,067sq km (412sq miles) in 2018 – a 92 percent decline in its original area.

According to Sakani, a delta is like an open hand, and its creeks are the sea’s slits of water. “The space between those fingers is home to millions of people, animals and other creatures, but it is rapidly shrinking. ”

As more and more land got degraded, residents were forced to migrate upstream. However, not everyone has the means to relocate. Those who remained in the Delta switched from farming to other professions, mainly fishing.

Haji Yousif Katiar, a village close to Dando Jetty, is home to Sidique Katiar, 55, who started fishing about 15 years ago.

“I remember there used to be only a few boats in our village. Every household now has boats, he reported to Al Jazeera, and the number of fishermen is rising daily.

Loss of livelihood

About a dozen boats depart from Dando Jetty from Sanhiri Creek in the Arabian Sea, approximately seven hours. makeshift huts are inhabited by the so-called “fishing labourers”.

One of them is Nathi Mallah, 50, a resident of Joho village in the Keti Bandar district of Thatta. She shoves a small iron rod into a jar of salt and then inserts it into the sandy ground. Due to its long, narrow, and rectangular shape, which resembles an old-fashioned razor, she quickly grabs the rod and grabs it.

Mallah works with her husband and six children to catch “maroarri”, which the fisherfolks say is only exported to China. Because the family works for a local contractor for 10 to 12 hours per day, which gives them some salt and drinking water, none of Mallah’s children attend school.

Marroarri sells for 42 Pakistani rupees (15 US cents) a kilo and each member of the Mallah family collects about 8-10kg daily, earning them enough to survive. When their fishing business in Joho began to decline, Nathi began the business five years ago.

Muhammad Sadique Mallah, Nathi’s husband, says increasing land degradation pushed people to switch from farming to fishing. The 55-year-old told Al Jazeera, “There are more fishermen on the sea than there were in my youth.

A 2019 report by the World Bank says catches of fish dwindled from 5,000 tonnes a year in 1951 to a meagre 300 tonnes now due to the Indus Delta’s degradation, forcing Pakistan to face a loss of $2bn annually.

Our men would sail to the sea in ten days, Nathi said. “Now they don’t come back even after a month. ”

No water for crops

In Dando Jetty, where Allah Bux Kalmati, 60, raises tomatoes, some vegetables, and betel leaves, he lives. He says freshwater is only available during the two months of the monsoon season.

However, Kalmati’s betel-leaf garden needs two weeks of water. “It has now been a month and there is no water for the plants,” he says.

At least 10 million acre feet (MAF) of water must be discharged annually down the Kotri Barrage, the last diversion on Indus, for the downstream deltaic ecosystem in accordance with the Water Apportionment Agreement (WAA) of 1991, an agreement between Pakistan’s four provinces regarding sharing water.

In 1991, the Switzerland-based International Union for Conservation for Nature, however, recommended a release of 27MAF annually – a goal that could never be materialised. Additionally, according to IRSA data, officials diverted water from the sea before it reached the sea for a period of 12 of the past 25 years to maintain it at a flow rate of less than 10MAF.

“Ten MAF water is not enough for Indus Delta. Before the canal system, it needed 180 to 200 million cubic feet of water per year, and it needs the same amount of water to survive, according to researcher Abbas, who attributes the water shortage to dams and barrages.

“We have 10 percent more water than the last century. However, adding that dams have waterlogged upstream and sedimentation from building canal after canal has caused that to divert water flow, he claimed.

Mahmood Nawaz Shah, president of a growers’ association in Sindh, said Pakistan’s irrigation system has become “old and outdated”. He claimed that while our average grain production is 130 grams per cubic meter, India’s production is 390 grams.

Shah explained that instead of expanding the irrigation system, Pakistan needs to fix the existing water network and better manage the resource. According to him, Pakistan uses 90% of its water for agriculture, while the rest is only used 75 percent globally, according to an article from the International Water Management Institute.

“There are areas where canals are available but water doesn’t reach when required. Take the Indus Delta as an example. You don’t have water for the existing cultivable lands. Pakistan needs to learn how to increase its production and conserve water. ”

Sakani recently returned from a visit to his ancestral village in Kharo Chan and is now back at Dando Jetty. Before heading home, he wanted to buy some fresh fish at Dando, but no boat had arrived from the sea that day.

He claimed that there was a time when we distributed beggars palla [hilsa herring]. “But now, we can’t get fish at this place. ”

Meanwhile, the high tide makes Khobar Creek look like the sea, now only 7-8km (4-5 miles) from Baghan, Sakani’s new hometown.

When we departed from Kharo Chan, he claimed, “The sea was 14 to 15 kilometers [8 to 9 miles] away.” “If there is no freshwater left downstream, the sea will continue to erode the land and, in the next 15 years, Baghan, too, will perish. We’ll need to relocate once more to another location.

Source: Aljazeera