We lost another iconic son of Sindh in the person of former Irrigation Secretary, Chairman of IRSA, and water expert, Engineer Muhammad Idriss Rajput, on 22 December 2025. The late Engineer Rajput had a long and successful career spanning over five decades, playing a vitally significant role in the irrigation system and water management of Sindh. He valiantly defended his land’s water rights within IRSA and even before it. He continued serving Sindh even after his retirement, organising workshops on water management and presenting the case of Sindh at regional and international conferences. I gratefully recall his crucial contribution to the success of the Water Dialogue held by Sindh Vision in Karachi a few years ago.
The role of defenders of the constitutional rights of their lands becomes very difficult in a society where the authorities disregard the constitutional delineations and imperatives of federal governance, and show a chronic obsession with amassing powers for absolute rule, trespassing, ignoring, or circumventing the political, economic, and constitutional rights of the smaller regions to the annoyance of constitutionalists, legal minds, or honest and fair officials. Such a compelling and chronic obsession has been the Achilles’ heel of Pakistan since its inception.
After the loss of the larger part of the country in December 1971, we framed a federal constitution and adopted a parliamentary form of government. The provincial autonomy provided by the 1973 Constitution did not correspond with the autonomous powers enjoyed by states in contemporary federations. The central government, taking advantage of the concurrent list, manipulated the provincial administrations and, sometimes, dismissed them without any regard for their clear majority. This happened repeatedly in the smaller provinces of Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Sindh.
Even the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted by consensus, did not prevent the larger federal unit, with its majority in all the national institutions, from infringing constitutional provisions and trespassing on the political, economic, financial, and water rights of smaller provinces through the federal structural machinery. The people of Balochistan and Sindh are bitterly disillusioned over the audacious exploitation of their economic resources over a long period, which includes mineral, oil, and gas deposits. These provinces have the largest deposits of gold, copper, precious earth metals, coal, gas, and oil. The constitutional clauses provide for a just, fair, and equitable distribution of the dividends from natural economic resources. The chronic disillusionment of Baloch over this economic and financial unfairness has metastasised into a full-fledged insurgency.
The short flow of sweet water into the Sindh Delta, one of the biggest deltas in the world, has seriously affected the mangrove forests, wildlife, and the hatching of rare fish and shrimp
The mantra of Kalabagh Dam resurfaces from time to time, despite brave resistance from the lower riparian states of Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The scheme was thoroughly debated during the dictatorship of General Zia and the civilian rule of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. General Pervez Musharraf also tried to evolve a consensus for the construction of the dam but backed out, realising the intensity of the resistance from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh. The foxy engineers of WAPDA, dominated by the larger federal unit, worked out an alternative scheme of six canals to be dug directly from the River Indus to please the Musharraf regime.
Sindh rejected the canal scheme. The Punjab authorities obtained a water availability certificate from the Indus River System Authority (IRSA) in January 2024 and, with the tacit approval of President Asif Ali Zardari in July, started work on the canals. Experts say that IRSA had no authority to issue a water availability certificate based on data from the summer cropping season, or Kharif. Sindh has been facing water scarcity of 19.4% for decades during the Kharif.
The canals would take an estimated 40,000 cusecs of water from the Indus. The situation would be critical in Sindh generally, and worse for the farmers at the tail end of the perennial canals that originate from Guddu and Sukkur Barrages. Sindh has already been receiving water grossly short of its share as provided in the Water Accords of 1991 because of climate change, which is drastically impacting the water flows in the river, water theft upstream owing to the chronically dysfunctional telemetry, and evaporation. The Sindhis fear that Punjab’s obsession with transforming the six million acres of the Cholistan desert into a green landscape will ultimately ruin as much fertile and arable land in Sindh.
In the Water Accords of 1991, Sindh was promised that 10 million acre-feet (MAF) of water would be allowed to flow downstream of Kotri into the sea. The late Engineer Muhammad Idriss persuaded an international conference of water experts held in Karachi in 2015 to determine the minimum limit of 17 million acre-feet to flow into the Delta. He presented facts and figures to prove that even 5 MAF of water had been flowing into the sea for decades, excluding the flood seasons, with the result that the sea was gradually advancing and submerging the fertile coastal lands of Sujawal, Thatta, and Badin.
According to a report, the sea has already submerged over 3.5 million acres of land in the above districts, pushing the poverty curve line up to 75%. The short flow of sweet water into the Sindh Delta, one of the biggest deltas in the world, has seriously affected the mangrove forests, wildlife, and the hatching of rare fish and shrimp. The delta is in ruin. It is deprived of the deposits of fertile silt which the mighty Indus once carried downstream of Kotri with its strong waves before the construction of the Tarbela and Mangla dams. The late Engineer Rajput loved the Sindh Delta.
Sindhi leaders have been unhappy over the bypassing of the Council of Common Interests by the federal authorities at the behest of Punjab. The coalition administration, with real powers at its back, has shown more arrogance than the powerful autocratic regimes of the past. It has continuously ignored the demands of the Sindhi leaders. The role of PPP leadership, to put it mildly, has been dubious. They made some noise in the media but shied away from passing a resolution in the Sindh Assembly and the Senate against the six-canal scheme.
At stake is the agricultural sector of Sindh, which is the mainstay of its economy. The majority of the population of Sindh has been struggling below the poverty line since the mega flood of 2010.