ISLAMABAD, May 26: The Indus River System Authority (Irsa) has convened an inter-provincial meeting on May 31 to look into the issue of water losses and launch an independent study to ascertain reasons.

The five Irsa members, provincial irrigation secretaries and senior officials of Wapda, Nespak and the Flood Commission will attend the meeting, Irsa sources told Dawn on Friday.

Water losses, sometimes described as ‘missing water’ or ‘theft’ in two major areas of the Punjab and Sindh — Taunsa-Guddu and Sukkur-Kotri — have become a cause of concern for the federal government as these “massively high” losses cannot in any case be attributed to the system’s weakness.

Losses in these areas average at around 40,000 cusec per day in May-June period and the Irsa and Wapda officials are not ready to accept them as system losses. In some cases, the losses are reported as high as over 60 per cent of the total released water. At times, people below Kotri face shortage of even drinking water due to these losses.

They said influential landlords in connivance with irrigation authorities, divert water to their land through machine pumps in the Taunsa-Guddu reach and through illegal water courses.

The meeting will also discuss ways of improving the monitoring of actual water release at various barrages till such time the telemetry system authority is fully operational.

The sources said some vested interests at these recording points also create technical faults in the telemetry system that was being installed for real-time recording of water releases and monitoring from the four provinces and Islamabad.