“The Indus in Sindh contains the combined waters of all the Punjab Rivers.”

These words were written in the 1902 India Commission Report. Today, the Indus River — South Asia’s longest — is barely a trickle once it leaves Punjab, and in its final 300-kilometre descent towards the sea, it is bone dry. Researchers predict that by 2040, Pakistan will be the most water-stressed country in the world, with water seepage and wastage from our outdated canal irrigation system largely to blame.

River dolphins are what scientists call indicator species, and their health and survival in freshwater ecosystems are indicators of water quality, and that in turn signals to humans whether all is well or not.

The indicator species for the Indus is the Indus River Dolphin — an animal that was almost declared extinct in 1969 but — with the help of indigenous river folk, the Sindh Wildlife Department and many others — it made a miraculous recovery from a mere 100 individuals in 1972 to around 2,000 in 2017, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Sixty percent of all river dolphins in Pakistan are in Sindh, the survey found.

However, the last survey conducted in 2022, unlike other surveys before it, did not show signs of significant growth in the Punjab region since 2017. Moreover, northern Sindh, which is the heartland of dolphin territory, is yet to be studied, as dacoits now dominate the flood plain.

Pakistan’s outdated water management and irrigation systems reduces the mighty Indus to a trickle once it enters Sindh. This has not only threatened the ecosystem of the Indus basin, but also species that thrive in its water, including the endangered Indus River dolphins…

With erratic weather patterns and plans to siphon water out of the Indus in Punjab, as well as new dams being built in the north, the fate of the Indus River dolphin once again hangs in the balance.

AN ECOSYSTEM IN PERIL

Canals have been a part of our landscape since the Indus Valley Civilisation, but were expanded by the British, the Pakistan Army and the World Bank. These canals bring much needed water to crops, but they ironically have led to a dramatic decrease in arable land.

Irrigation has caused salt deposits to form where the water is unable to evaporate fast enough; these have turned farmland into snow white salt pans, where nothing can grow.

According to one 2008 research paper, Salinity and Water-logging in the Indus Basin of Pakistan: Economic Loss to Agricultural Economy, 43 percent of farmland in the Indus Basin Irrigation System is classified as waterlogged, with the water table at a depth of less than three metres, affecting around 7.1 million hectares.

Meanwhile, decades of research into how to fix this issue has not resulted in effective recommendations. One suggested solution included installing tube wells to pump excess groundwater out of the ground in the 1970s, specifically to save Mohenjo Daro from the eroding effects of salinity. As of yet, this has not shown the desired results.

Other methods of healing saline and water-logged land is to plant indigenous flora, such as tamarisk and salt bushes, that are common along the riverine forests. However, such a process may take decades to heal the earth.

Climate change has added more stress on this strained river ecosystem. In 2010, a glacial flood inundated one fifth of Pakistan; in 2011, another flood caused extensive damage in Sindh; and in 2022, Pakistan saw its largest flood ever, inundating one third of the nation’s land mass.

As the global temperature continues to rise, droughts become a looming threat, and heatwaves have been getting worse every year. In June, a prolonged heat wave claimed at least 49 lives in Karachi, with relief workers saying that the figure was much higher.

Last year, Brazil woke up to an alarming reality. On October 2, 2023, 120 Amazon River dolphins were found dead in Lake Tefé. The cause of death: drought and extreme heat, with water temperatures in the shallow lake reaching 43 degrees Celsius. Such an event in a river system that is much healthier than our own should deeply concern all of us.

Unlike the Amazon River basin, which contains thousands of uninterrupted rivers, streams, natural canals and channels — in which their river dolphins can roam free without hindrance — the habitable range for the Indus River dolphin in Pakistan has sadly been constrained to one single channel, interrupted by six barrages and one dam, with more on the way.

Last year, Brazil woke up to an alarming reality. On October 2, 2023, 120 Amazon River dolphins were found dead in Lake Tefé. The cause of death: drought and extreme heat, with water temperatures in the shallow lake reaching 43 degrees Celsius.

As mentioned earlier, 60 percent of our river dolphins — known locally as bulhan — live in Sindh, where they remain extremely vulnerable to actions upstream. A slight change in water levels can signal certain death to much of river life, alongside affecting a significant population of Sindh.

THE STATE OF THE INDUS

A visit to the Indus south of the Sukkur Barrage in Sindh in the dry season would make anyone shudder. Punjab’s Indus is truly Asia’s ‘Lion River’: here, it is 35 kms in width with thousands of islands.

But a series of 15 barrages and 150 large and small dams brings this giant to its knees. In Sindh, at some points, it is barely 200 metres across, with an average depth of three feet and, in its final descent, it is bone dry.

On a trip to Sukkur in January of 2023, I paid a visit to mother Indus, expecting to dock a boat to journey to the famous island temple of Sadhu Bela. Where the river once lapped the shore, there was a 20-foot drop down.

At Sadhu Bela, the steps of the temple’s famous ghat were barely visible — covered with grey Indus silt. Such high levels of silt deposition have accelerated in recent years, caused by deforestation along the Indus, as well as barrages and embankments that prevent this silt from freely depositing downstream at the delta, where it would act as a defence against intruding seawater.

“Silt was never an issue when we were children,” remarks Mahesh Kumar, a devotee of Sadhu Bela and on the temple’s committee. “As kids we used to walk up these steps in the dry season,” he tells Eos while pointing to the now mound of sand.

Here, at Sukkur, is one of Pakistan’s highest concentrations of Indus River dolphins. I have been actively and passively involved in the WWF and the Sindh Wildlife Department’s dolphin conservation efforts since 2005. In 2022, I had the honour of being part of the Indus Dolphin Survey, and I have now seen dolphins in three out of four of Pakistan’s provinces.

The contrast between the river in Punjab and Sindh is jarring, a giant river is buckled to its knees and reduced to a trickle, in certain parts in the winter season, one can walk all the way across.

THE CLIMATE PRECIPICE

The West may be partly to blame for climate change — but this phenomenon is as much local as it is global. The Indus Water Treaty of 1960, which Pakistan signed with India, would sound the death knell of the Indus River basin. The World Bank, under whose auspices the Treaty was signed, paid for new barrages. One of them is the Kotri barrage, the last of the barrages on the Indus, holding up water upstream that is fed into perennial canals. In the dry months, there is no water past Kotri in the Indus River’s 300-km descent into the sea.

Kotri has caused a mass exodus from Thatta and Badin into other districts of Sindh. Sea intrusion has eaten up nearly one thousand acres of land, forever lost to the sea, and this has its effects upstream as well.

Some applaud the dams and barrages — water to the sea is water wasted, they claim. But it is about time we ask: wasted on who?

When a river is cut off from the sea, the hydrological cycle is disturbed. The hydrological cycle applies to all river systems — rain is formed in the ocean and becomes clouds, which then follow a river’s delta to its source, where they condense and it rains, refilling the river, its aquifers and freezing to replenish glaciers. The glaciers melt, the rivers are full, the water reaches the sea, it evaporates to form clouds, and the cycle repeats.

Pakistan once received two monsoons: one from the Arabian Sea followed the path of the Indus and the other from the Bay of Bengal followed the Ganges. At present, we now only receive the tail end of the Bengal monsoon.

Our glaciers are, therefore, melting at a much faster rate than they can replenish, causing a reduction in water in Pakistan’s two largest dams: Tarbela and Mangla. When the glaciers do melt, they create angry torrents of water that bring with them silt, mud and rock, no longer held together by forests. This has caused silt to deposit behind dams and barrages: there is not only less water to store, but there is also less capacity to store water.

What happened in Lake Tefé in Brazil is tame compared to what could be on the horizon for us.

‘ON DEATH’S DOOR’

The Indus depends on a fast-disappearing series of glaciers in Kashmir and Tibet. This water is halted and diverted at many points, worsening any water shortage issue downstream. Other sources of freshwater further south, such as the Koh-i-Suleman, the Kirthar Hills, Aror Hills and Kathore, are all being levelled and mined or turned into real estate developments. We ourselves are systematically eliminating local sources of water.

Sindh was once considered water-rich, with natural distributaries branching off from the Indus and meandering their way towards the Arabian Sea and the Rann of Kutch. In the summer, a giant marshland — the sweet ocean — connected Sehwan with Multan and another connected Gujarat with Thatta. In the winter, the water slowed and Sindh’s thick forests would grow and host thousands of birds from all over the world.

In the mid-19th century, British general Henry Pottinger remarked: “The jungles and immense tracts now usurped by tamarisk bushes and rank vegetation, might yet however be reclaimed to the plough.” This statement would mark forever our state’s relationship to this river and its people. Sindh was once 40 percent forest, down to 25 percent in 1974. Today, it is estimated to be 2.5 percent forested.

It is time that we understood the Indus River as not only a living connected ecosystem, but also a suffering one that is on death’s door. We now believe that inequality is normal — the north has water and Sindh does not. History turns this idea on its head — Sindh was once an oasis.

Today, there is still no unified desire in our country to save this ecosystem in its entirety — what exists instead is a tired, old, dangerous narrative of ‘water storage’, which creates extreme inequality between our provinces and gives us no lasting solutions to life-threatening problems.

The science is clear: a river must meet the sea to thrive. Humans are not separate from this system; we are very much a part of it, and we can save it.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is an environmentalist and founder of Bulhan Bachao, which works on wildlife conservation through community engagement.

X: @BhuttoZulfikar

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 25th, 2024