I was reading Alice Albinia’s Empires of the Indus and came across this interesting passage. The context is that the author is on a fisherman’s boat around the Indus Delta, and explaining the larger history behind it drying up.

Pakistan, in its turn, began building the Kotri barrage, just north of Thatta. This dam, like those that followed, was supposed to solve the country’s problems. But while it indeed facilitated the mass production of cash crops, Kotri also began the trend of the next sixty years: growing debt to Western banks, experts and construction firms. Pakistan is not alone in its mania for large hydraulic structures as the answer to its food and water shortages. Nor is it alone in discovering that over-irrigation leads to salination of agricultural land upstream, and the rapid death of river deltas. Following the construction of the Kotri barrage in 1958, the Delta shrank from 3,500 to 250 square kilometres. With barely any water flowing south to the sea, salt water was sucked into the mangroves. The fields of red rice [adjacent to the Delta] turned to white salt encrustations, and the farmers had no choice but to turn to fishing.

‘The farmers here voted against the Sukkur barrage,’ Baboo [one of her guides] says as we stand together in the graveyard of Soki Bunder. The old men at Kharochan agree: ‘After Sukkur opened, farmers became fishermen,’ says the doctor. ‘And with Kotri, then all the rice fields went saline. After that was Tarbela. But nobody would listen to us that the Delta needs more water.’

I think this is important to emphasize, since water is inevitably a political hot potato in Pakistan, upstream vs downstream, Punjab and Upper Sindh vs Lower Sindh (amongst other cleavages). But water is only a political hot potato because people’s lives and livelihoods are at stake. There are plenty of faux grievances within the Pakistani body politic, but this one is very, very real. The geography of Pakistan is literally changing year by year. The Indus Delta, in many ways, isn’t a Delta anymore, it’s just a beach, and a salty beach at that.

The "Indus delta"

One other point I would make is, echoing James Scott, the mistake of executing these grand designs that are supposed to solve people’s problems. They are instituted on these massive scales because that’s the scale on which states “see”. But that’s not how citizens “see”. Because they are more intimately aware of local conditions – physical, cultural, social, and so on – citizens generally have a better idea of how to go about fixing problems. But nobody asks them.

Keep in mind that not asking them is not just a problem for the beleaguered citizens. It’s also a problem for the state, since it failed to do what it thought it was going to do.

I’m not arguing all political and social problems can be solved locally. Far from it. Imagine every district in Pakistan having its own currency and exchange rate, for example. That would be insane.

But arguing for big dams and their potential for solving Pakistan’s water problems really seems to miss the target, in my view. If people in lower Sindh are upset about it, there’s probably a good reason.