Facts can be taken to mean anything when read in isolation. Take for example Pakistan’s ranking in the comity of nations in terms of water scarcity. As per a global ranking index published by World Resources Institute, it stands at 23rd, which of itself does not seem worrying considering developed countries such as UAE, Singapore and Israel make it top ten.
But look closely, and you find that not one of the top 50 countries has a river drainage basin as fertile as ours. Look closer still, and you find that despite adverse geography, many countries in the top 10 have improved their ranking over past decade by investing in low cost innovations in water management. One such place is Singapore.
For a better part of its history, Singapore’s economy was wholly dependent on imported water from Malaysia. But as Malaysian water supply has dried up due to severe drought conditions in the country, Singapore looked elsewhere to meet its challenges.
While the country falls in tropical region with heavy seasonal monsoon rains, it has an area smaller than the city of Islamabad or less than one-third that of Karachi. Hence, the storm and rainwater though in abundance could not be stored by building any dams.
The country has no natural lake or aquifers either, so it came with a strategy of what is known as “four national taps”. As part of the strategy, the country has constructed a system of local catchment water by building more than 15 reservoirs to harvest and collect rainwater on more than two-thirds of its land surface (an area of roughly 420 sq. kilometers).
The second leg of the strategy includes reclaiming waste water through “advance membrane technologies, reverse osmosis (RO), and ultraviolet disinfection”. Water treated using these methods is safe for human consumption and meets up to 30 percent of the country’s needs.
As an island nation, Singapore also relies heavily on desalinated sea water, using RO plants which are one of the largest in Asia. With a coastline of just 193km compared to Pakistan’s 1,046km, desalination capabilities supply up to 100 million gallons of water per day, meeting country’s 25 percent needs. While imported water used to be the fourth leg of this strategy in the past, the country plans on replacing imported water completely with reclaimed water by 2050.
It is often argued, and rightly so, that Pakistan’s water consumption practices are highly inefficient and wasteful. While this may be correct from a water pricing perspective, Pakistanis still consume less than 75 liters of water per capita per day compared to Singapore’s 143 liters per capita per day. Therefore, while improving water conservation is one of the many solutions, using innovative methods of water recycling and storage is another way to go.
More importantly, Pakistan also needs to urgently consider whether it will continue to waste time complaining about lack of national consensus on construction of mega dams. If the perennial question of Kalabagh brings out such belligerence from sub-nationalistic quarters, maybe it’s high time to shelve the idea altogether and look at Singapore’s low-cost solutions to increase water storage.
In any case, construction of any dam requires a long-term approach that not only requires political consensus but large-scale funding that Pakistan may not even be sustain due to currently high levels of debt. Pakistan needs to stop talking the talk and instead walk the walk if it is to tackle what is probably the most serious among its long list of “national security” challenges.
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