KARACHI: Small growers of tail end areas of Thatta district have decided to assemble in the coastal village of Thare Wari near Kharo Chhaan on Saturday to discuss the destruction of their seedlings and crops over hundreds of acres owing to of a shortage of water.

The decision was taken at a meeting of local abadgar (small growers) and fishermen community leaders in Baghan town on Tuesday. The participants shared their woes relating to livelihoods and discussed an effective course of action.

A spokesman for the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF) said his organisation was mobilising growers of the tail-end areas to help them save their livelihoods.

At the meeting, growers complained that they were facing an acute water shortage because influential landowners were diverting flow of canal water to their own lands before it could reach the tail-end.

Gulab Shah, a local PFF activist having his land in Keti Bunder said tail-end growers had lost their standing crops because of persisting water shortage.

He apprehended that they might not be able to cultivate their lands if the situation persisted. He said the affected growers had conveyed their serious concern to the irrigation department, as well as the provincial government and lawmakers with a request to look into their woes. However, he regretted, there had been no response from them so far.

He said the meeting decided to launch an effective campaign in this regard for which Keti Bunder and Kharo Chhaan growers were being mobilised.

He said the authorities concerned and public representatives, besides the media, would be apprised of the gravity of the situation during the campaign.

Mr Shah noted that the tail-end growers of Thatta used to get water from the Indus through tributaries until a few years back but for the few years they were receiving not a single drop through the K.B. Feeder that also fed the Keenjhar lake and lands in Keti Bunder and some other areas.

In view of a chronic shortage of water, some abadgars who had been growing banana, paddy, betel leaf and other such cash crops were forced to switch over to some other crops that required less water but they had not yet fully made up their mind.

This option had also lost its attraction as the water shortage had now turned into an outage. “Water is not available for human and animal consumption in the tail-end areas,” he said, adding that growers and their livestocks were surviving on subsoil water.

Most growers at the meeting said they could no more afford keeping livestocks as they and their animals needed potable water to survive.

Kharo Chhaan and Keti Bunder had once been prosperous towns having plenty of river water passing through the deltaic region across the year. Growers of the area had fertile lands to produce crops of their choice, marine resources and livestock.

The changing weather pattern and its fallouts over the past few decades rendered the entire region backward and pushed its population to below the poverty line.

PFF chairman Mohammed Ali Shah told the meeting that sea erosion had destroyed a large number of villages around Keti Bunder and Kharo Chhaan forcing the affected families to migrate to other areas for a livelihood. He recalled that the region had been producing vegetables, fruits, betel leaf, besides dairy products, for Karachi and other urban centres but now the growers did not have even food for their own survival.

He said that provision of safe water to everyone had been recognised in international treaties as a human right and, as such, the government of Pakistan should take the case of tail-end deltaic people to the world community in order to resolve the issue and avert a possible drought or famine in the region.

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2014