Groundwater: the invisible lifeline Pakistan is squandering

Scenes like this are now common across tail-end Punjab: a small farmer sells an acre or two, not to pay debt, but to buy solar panels. His canal turn has become unreliable. The water table has dropped beyond his old pump’s reach.

Grid electricity has tripled in cost. Solar is the only arithmetic that works. He is now pumping groundwater he does not own, from a depth his father never needed, to irrigate a field. He calls it a solution. It is, in fact, the crisis made visible.

When groundwater falls, large farmers drill deeper. Small farmers sell land.

According to research published in 2023 by Pakistan’s Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR), Lahore extracts roughly 4.32 million cubic metres of groundwater daily through nearly 1,800 tubewells, with the water table falling by approximately one metre each year.

Rawalpindi’s levels are declining at 2.5 metres annually. In the Quetta Valley the drop is nearly six metres per year, with tubewell depths now exceeding 350 metres.

These are not alarmist projections. They are measured data from Pakistan’s own federal water research authority.

An estimated 50 million acre-feet (MAF) of groundwater is pumped annually through more than 1.4 million tubewells nationwide. Punjab accounts for over 90 percent of this abstraction. Pakistan is now among the largest groundwater users in the world.

Yet groundwater remains largely absent from our public discourse. We debate canals, dams, river treaties, and upstream diversions. But the foundation of our agriculture and much of our drinking water lies beneath our feet. And it is under strain.

A landmark study in Nature Geoscience found that during the twentieth century, the Indus canal system led to a net groundwater accumulation of at least 340 MAF across the Indus Basin. Canal seepage, long dismissed as engineering inefficiency, helped build the freshwater aquifer that sustains much of Punjab today. Tubewell expansion has since outpaced recharge. This is not merely depletion. It is the erosion of a buffer that took a century to build.

The World Bank estimates the Indus Basin aquifer holds approximately 8,100 MAF in total storage. That figure can sound reassuring. It should not. Only about 1,000 MAF, less than thirteen percent, is fresh and usable without treatment. The remainder is brackish or saline.

Even that usable fraction is unevenly distributed and unevenly depleted. Aggregate figures conceal local distress. Urban centres are declining. Tail-end commands are declining. Rice- and sugarcane-growing areas are declining. We are living on inherited surplus and assuming it will last indefinitely.

Punjab’s canal system contributes more than 80 percent of aquifer recharge in many regions, creating a dangerous policy paradox. Field losses, often over 50 percent of diverted canal water, are not pure waste: much percolates downward, sustaining the aquifer. Lining canals without coordinated groundwater management may reduce recharge and accelerate depletion. Efficiency gains, absent aquifer governance, can deepen the very crisis they are meant to address.

More than 70 percent of Pakistan’s drinking water comes from groundwater. In rural Punjab and Sindh, roughly 90 percent of households rely on it for domestic use. Yet much fails basic quality standards, contaminated by arsenic, fluoride, and agricultural runoff.

The World Bank is unambiguous: vulnerable households rely on groundwater despite its poor quality because they lack access to piped supply and cannot afford alternatives. Inequality is embedded in the hydrology: head-end farmers struggle with water-logging while tail-end farmers pump deeper at higher cost.

Punjab cannot plead a lack of legislation. The 2023 Punjab Irrigation, Drainage and Rivers Act declared all groundwater rights vested in the Government, ending the colonial-era private entitlement. But vesting is only meaningful if paired with an enforceable permit regime: without licensing and regulated entitlements, it remains a statement of ownership rather than an instrument of governance. In practice, abstraction remains largely unmetered, licensing inoperative, monitoring patchy.

The law changed. The pumping did not.

A newer disruption is accelerating the crisis. Solar panel prices in Pakistan fell roughly 80 percent between 2017 and 2025, driven by a surge in Chinese imports that made Pakistan the world’s third-largest importer of Chinese solar panels in 2024. With agricultural electricity tariffs reaching PKR 22 to 28 per unit and diesel prices remaining high, the payback period for a solar tubewell has shrunk to under one year.

The result has been explosive adoption: nearly half of all tubewells in Pakistan, roughly 650,000 out of more than 1.4 million, are now solar-powered, according to Reuters, citing estimates derived from national energy authority data. They operate outside the grid, beyond energy billing, and largely beyond monitoring.

The hydrological consequence is already measurable: areas where the water table has fallen below 60 feet now cover 6.6 percent of Punjab, a 25 percent increase since 2020, while zones deeper than 80 feet have more than doubled in five years. Under diesel, a farmer irrigated once a day.

Under solar, with sunlight free, many irrigate several times a day. For decades, the electricity connection to a tubewell was the last practical point of state contact with groundwater users. Solar technology is severing that connection, pump by pump. Without a licensing regime independent of the energy grid, pumping will expand and become progressively harder to regulate.

The World Bank projects Pakistan’s water demand will exceed available supply by 2047. Population growth alone is expected to reduce freshwater availability per person from around 1,100 cubic metres today to approximately 900 cubic metres by 2050, before accounting for climate change or aquifer depletion.

This crisis is not primarily about hydrology. It is about governance. We know how much we pump. We know where depletion is occurring. We know recharge depends on canal seepage. We know cropping patterns intensify extraction. We have enacted laws. We have vested groundwater in the State. What we have not done is operationalise management at scale. The gap is not scientific knowledge. It is political will.

Addressing the crisis means treating the 2023 Act’s vesting clause as an obligation, not a declaration: through aquifer mapping, mandatory metering in the most stressed districts, integration of canal operations with groundwater management, and regulation of solar tubewells before unregulated pumping becomes impossible to control.

Crop choices are equally overdue for honest scrutiny: water-intensive crops such as rice, sugarcane and cotton consume a disproportionate share of our water while generating disproportionately low returns per unit consumed.

Groundwater does not disappear dramatically. It declines gradually, until pumping becomes too deep, too expensive, too saline, too late. In the Quetta Valley, where the water table drops nearly six metres a year, that point is not a distant projection. It is an approaching reality.

Punjab has declared groundwater a public resource. The law changed. The pumping did not. The question is whether we will govern it as one before the water beneath us runs out.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026