Water scarcity has reached alarming proportions all over the world. Some 1.1 billion people in the world do not have access to safe water. It is said that water shortages occur not only due to physical shortages, but also because of inadequate governance and a lack of efficiency. The basic issue is that of a mismatch between demand and supply, due to which safe, clean water is often not available at the right location and at the right time. The tremendous population growth and rapidly melting glaciers in the Himalayas will ensure that the water crisis in South Asia as well will deepen further before it eases. A new report by the US-based Woodrow Wilson Center, titled Running on Empty: Pakistan’s Water Crisis, has cited Pakistan’s water availability to have plummeted from about 5,000 m3 per capita in the early 1950s to less than 1,500 m3 per capita today. Pakistan is expected to become ‘water-scarce’, with below 1,000 m3 per capita by the year 2035, with some experts projecting that this could happen by 2020, if not sooner.Pakistan faces these serious challenges due to its inability to define water rights and implement equitable water regulation policies — which have led to a serious degradation of existing water sources — as well as grossly inefficient irrigation, sanitation and water supply services.An arid country dependent on agriculture, Pakistan allocates over 90 percent of its water resources to irrigation and other agricultural needs. The inefficient utilisation of this water has, however, led to lack of access for the poor on the one hand and intensive irrigation on the other, which, compounded by poor drainage practices, has caused massive waterlogging and salinisation. Critics argue that our national water projects continue to benefit large and wealthy farmers despite the fact that Pakistan has approximately four million farms that are smaller than two hectares.Moreover, with most of Pakistan’s water dedicated to agriculture, less than 10 percent is left for drinking water and sanitation. A quarter of Pakistanis lack access to safe drinking water, including those who live in cities. Moreover, the drinking water that does exist is quickly disappearing. Lahore, which relies on groundwater, faces water table declines of up to 65 feet.The scarcity of clean water in the cities is exacerbated by a lack of wastewater treatment, and is now a leading cause of deadly epidemics in major cities like Faisalabad, Lahore and Karachi. Last year, an estimated 30,000 people from Karachi, including 20,000 children, died due to complications caused by diseases related to drinking unsafe water.A reliable supply of water will result in major health improvements in the country. In Bangladesh for instance, the combined improvement in drinking water and primary health care led to a drop in mortality caused by diarrhea from 300,000 deaths per year in 1980 to 150,000 in 1997. It is about time that our policy makers also realise this fact, and do more to assure safe drinking water, which can help curb our alarmingly high mortality rates.Pakistan has recently put together two major policies regarding water use and conservation — the National Drinking Water Policy and the National Sanitation Policy. The main goal of the former is to ensure safe drinking water at an affordable cost, and in an efficient manner so as to reduce mortality and morbidity caused by water-borne diseases.But it is questionable how a single policy with fixed parameters can be implemented across different areas of the country, with their own unique geographical and institutional challenges. There is also a need for independent regulation for making water operations more efficient since self-regulation is a questionable preposition.Several of the specific measures identified by the water policy have also raised concerns, such as the proposed installation of water filtration plants across the country by the year 2015, which is considered an expensive and inappropriate suggestion given the ground realities of limited maintenance ability, and the fact that these filtration plants can hardly be provided to all neighbourhoods across the country.The national water policy has introduced the idea of raising user fees for cost recovery but stopped short of privatising water supply completely. However, a word of caution is due when discussing the privatisation of water supply and sanitation. One of the important expectations from the private sector is that it can bring in resources to invest in the water sector so that coverage can be increased. Yet, increasing water coverage in developing economies has been difficult to achieve. Water users in poorer countries are often not willing to pay tariffs, partly because people are not aware of the health benefits flowing from a reliable supply of water. Private suppliers aim to make a profit and thus invest only in areas where they are guaranteed a profit. Therefore, selective application of private sector participation in the water and sanitation sector should be undertaken, backed by a rigorous prior assessment of the feasibility of privatising water provision. When prevailing conditions are not suitable for involving the private sector, reforming the public utility should be given due consideration instead. Pakistan has the technological and financial resources to maintain a nuclear arsenal, so providing safe water and sanitation services should not be too big a challenge, if all the decision makers deem it to be a necessity. There obviously needs to be such a consensus for investing significantly in improvement of the existing infrastructure. But the need here is not to import expensive machinery, which will soon fall into disrepair, but to instead invest in modest, indigenous technology, which can be applied much more broadly.More attention needs to be focused on the links between agricultural and urban water pressures. It is about time that conserving water got the attention it deserves by adoption of less water-intensive crops and focusing on water-saving technologies. The need for water-conservation by design is evident from the fact that more than 390 million gallons of water are being wasted in Karachi alone on a daily-basis due to basic carelessness of citizens and a leakage in the pipelines and tankers.It is also imperative to address structural obstacles like systemic inequality and gender discrimination. Rural women and small farmers are particularly affected by Pakistan’s water crisis, so they can no longer be shut out of the government’s water-planning and decision-making processes. Unless such measures are taken, the multiple implications of water scarcity will put a further strain on the vital agricultural economy, the political relations between the provinces, as well as the socio-economic and physical welfare of the average citizen. The writer is a researcher. He can be contacted at ali@policy.hu