LAHORE, Oct 22: The Punjab on Tuesday refused to buy Sindh’s argument that it needed more water to protect the environment along Indus River and maintained that the 1991 Water Accord had only provided for water to check sea intrusion in the Indus. No other environmental hazard was covered by the accord, it claimed.

According to a source in the Ministry of Water and Power, the province, at a meeting in Islamabad on Monday, maintained: “By making results of any environmental study part of the overall water distribution system in the country, the federal government would take the whole system out of the ambit of the accord. Such studies, however independent, are bound to raise eyebrows in other provinces. Why the federal and Sindh’s governments are bent upon destroying the basis of consensus for such a sensitive issue is anybody’s guess.

“The Water Accord recognised the need for checking sea intrusion and allowed studies in this regard. The province of Sindh must conduct studies to chalk out ways and means to contain sea invasion. However, it must not open other fronts; if it comes up with an environmental study and demands water for dealing with its consequences, who would stop other province from doing the same. For example, the Punjab lost water of three eastern rivers to India as a consequence of the Indus Basin Treaty. It can also come up with its own studies to demand more water for the environmental degradation caused by three completely dried river beds.” Such myopic decisions, if allowed, could jeopardise the hard-won consensus on the Water Accord, the official warned.

A Punjab government official also maintained that they would have no objections to any studies within the ambit of the accord, which only allowed water for sea intrusion. Any other study would neither be part of the accord nor mandatory prescription for other federating units, he insisted.

“Of course, the Punjab cannot stop any federating unit from conducting studies on its own natural resources,” said an official of the Punjab government.

However, it would resist the efforts for making these studies part of the overall water strategy of the country. That would open another Pandora’s box. Who would then stop the Punjab, NWFP and Balochistan from assessing the negative environmental impact of various calamities and demand more water, he insisted.

The need for water downstream Kotri has remained a myth for most of the experts in the country for the last many years, claimed a member of the Wapda’s water wing. Water for checking sea intrusion and protecting mangroves along the Indus is available only from July to September, when around 90 per cent of the river water flows down to sea. For the remaining nine months, the river bed remains vulnerable to sea anyway.

The province of Sindh needs a permanent protection which it can get only by building dikes on Indus River.

Sea invasion is linked to the behaviour of tidal waves in the Arabian Sea rather than water flow in Indus, claims a hydrologist. Even in its full capacity, which is a rarity, the Indus cannot stop tidal waves from the Arabian Sea, which have historically attained a maximum height of eight feet. Given the three-foot slope for every kilometre in Sindh, the sea can invade the river up to 24km. Sindh must either learn to live with the impact or build dikes at a desirable point to check it. Instead of implementing this internationally-tested formula, Sindh has chosen to lock horns with other provinces demanding water for environment, he said and added, protection of mangroves and environment could never be allowed at the cost of human beings living upstream.