The Pakistan Economy Watch (PEW) on Sunday said the scarcity of water is transforming the country into a desert which requires immediate attention of the government. A country dependent on agriculture has framed its first National Water Policy after 70 long years while provinces like Punjab and Sindh have yet to announce their water policies, it said. PEW President Dr Murtaza Mughal said that water scarcity has been felt across the country but nobody seems concerned about water management to reduce its wastage. He said that per capita availability of water in Pakistan stood at 5,260 cubic metres in 1951 which was reduced to 1,000 cubic metres by 2016 and it is likely to further drop to about 860 by 2025 which will be a doomsday scenario for the country. Dr Murtaza Mughal said that the Indus River system receives an annual influx of about 134.8 million acre-feet of water of which water worth $60 billion is wasted. Reduced supply and increased demand has forced people, mostly farmers, to extract around 50 million acre-feet of groundwater which is unsustainable, he said. Around 95 percent of the available water is utilised by the agricultural sector of which a major chunk is wasted by water-intensive crops of sugarcane and rice. The area under cultivation for water and rice continue to increase which should be seen as a threat, he demanded. Dr Mughal said that the government should discourage sugarcane and rice crops by diverting farmers to other crops as Pakistan uses more than double the water as compared to other Asian countries to get one kilogramme of rice while it uses 1,500 to 3,000 litres of water to get one kilogramme of sugar. Published in Daily Times, September 3rd 2018.