Driven by an unregulated network of over 1.5 million tubewells, Pakistan is hurtling towards a severe national water and food security emergency as annual groundwater extraction outpaces natural replenishment.
The country now extracts 65 cubic kilometers of groundwater annually against a recharge rate of just 55 cubic kilometers, making it the world’s fourth-largest groundwater user and home to the second-most overstressed aquifer system globally, states the latest report by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE).
Today, nearly 60 percent of irrigation, over 70 percent of drinking water and almost all industrial operations rely on this vanishing resource.
Compounding the quantitative deficit is an escalating public health crisis: 70 to 80 percent of groundwater nationwide is unsafe to drink, with dangerous arsenic levels threatening up to 60 million people and salinity crippling 21 percent of irrigated land.
Titled “Pakistan’s Groundwater Crisis: Policy Lessons and a Framework for Sustainable Resource Use,” the study emphasises that the country’s water distress is fundamentally a failure of policy and governance rather than a physical lack of water.
While Pakistan commands a massive underground storage capacity equivalent to roughly 50 large dams, historical policy biases heavily favor surface-water planning, leaving aquifers treated as open-access resources.
Pervasive government interventions, such as subsidised electricity for tubewells and heavy price supports for water-intensive crops like rice and sugarcane, have incentivised chronic over-pumping, particularly in Punjab, which accounts for roughly 90 percent of the country’s total groundwater extraction.
Consequently, water tables are plunging by one to three feet annually in major urban and agricultural hubs, including Lahore, Quetta and Karachi.
Furthermore, Pakistan carries the unique distinction of being the world’s largest exporter of depleted groundwater embedded in agricultural exports such as rice, leather and textiles, accounting for 29 percent of global trade in goods produced via overabstracted aquifers, surpassing both the United States and India.
To pull the country back from the brink of a “point of no return,” the PIDE report outlines a prioritised roadmap divided into three timeframes. Immediate actions within 0 to 2 years include universal licensing and metering of all extraction points, phasing out distortionary electricity subsidies and establishing an empowered National Groundwater Council.
Medium-term reforms over 2 to 5 years involve overhauling water pricing to reflect true scarcity, shifting agricultural demand towards less water-intensive crops and institutionalising real-time monitoring through a National Aquifer Mapping Programme.
Long-term transformations beyond 5 years call for untying archaic colonial water rights from land ownership, investing heavily in Managed Aquifer Recharge and wastewater treatment, and integrating groundwater governance into regional transboundary frameworks.
The report concludes that without immediate political will and synchronised governance reforms, the ongoing depletion of Pakistan’s aquifers will irreversibly cripple its economic stability, public health and climate change adaptability.
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