Pakistan's water crisis runs deeper than scarcity

The 2025 deadline and what it actually means

Muzamil opens the conversation by asking the direct question everyone is asking: Will Pakistan become a water-scarce nation by 2025. This is no longer whispered in policy circles. Media outlets ring alarm bells. Experts invoke the red flag. Yet Masroor Ahmad, a World Bank water and sanitation specialist with over 30 years in the sector, offers a more nuanced read. The numbers are real, he says, but they miss the larger story.

“It’s a fact that water is becoming more and more scarce commodity across the globe,” Masroor says. In Pakistan’s case, urbanization, climate change, and uncontrolled extraction have converged. But the crisis is not destiny. What matters is whether institutions respond or, as has been the pattern, drift into reactive firefighting.

Groundwater collapse and the invisible emergency

The numbers are stark. Lahore’s water table is falling by 1 meter per year, nearly 3.5 feet. This is not natural decline. Every household, farm, and factory owns a tube well and extracts water without license, permission, or control. There is no regulation. There is no metering. There is no consequence.

“It’s not an infinite basin under the ground,” Masroor explains. “Every person has their tube and their board, and they’re extracting water without any control, without any licensing, without any permission, whether he is doing government or private sector.”

This is a collective action problem disguised as a resource problem. Pakistan has not built the institutional guardrails that regulate demand. The government speaks in targets and timelines, yet the water sector operates in what Masroor calls a “headless chicken situation” where everyone moves but no one knows where they are going.

Why policies exist on paper but not in practice

Muzamil asks whether Pakistan has water policy. The answer is both yes and no. Policy was developed in 2006 and 2009 for the first time. Yet three provinces, Balochistan among them, have no water policy and no sanitation policy despite water and sanitation being explicitly provincial subjects under the 1973 constitution.

Masroor describes what happens instead: “If there is no policy, then it depends on what the head is in the morning. Sometimes they are good people, they are doing good work, but unfortunately it is not a good thing.”

This is not incompetence. It is structural. A CEO or department head operates without a binding mandate, without measurable targets, without accountability beyond transfer or removal. In contrast, private utilities and international agencies use service contracts tied to performance indicators. Pakistan’s institutions have none of this.

Sanitation: the harder problem

Muzamil brings up a traveler’s observation. An Indonesian visitor noted the paradox: a Muslim-majority nation with explicit religious emphasis on cleanliness yet with an “abysmal state of affairs” in sanitation. Pakistan is the third largest open defecation country after India and Indonesia, despite major NGO efforts and the Gates Foundation’s work.

The problem is not toilets. Pakistan has built toilets. The problem is behavior and outcomes. “Our focus was always on the output, that the number should come, how many latrines have become, how many roads have become,” Masroor says. “It wasn’t the focus on the outcome.”

Outcome-focused models, like Bangladesh’s Community-Led Total Sanitation movement, emphasize open-defecation-free zones. A traveler passing through should see no human waste. This requires behavior change, not construction. Pakistan invests billions in sewage without treatment plants. Karachi has only 2 to 3 treatment facilities running at 20 to 30 percent capacity. The rest flows straight back into rivers and streams.

Moving from groundwater to surface water

The solution is not one technology but a multi-pronged strategy. Masroor speaks of three pillars: increase storage (dams), shift from groundwater to surface water, and drive conservation through metering and behavior change.

“We have to work. The government of Pakistan has to work on multi-pronged strategy,” he says. Currently, only Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, and Faisalabad have meaningful surface water access. Most cities depend on groundwater. As extraction costs rise with deeper tables and energy prices spike, the economics of surface water improve.

Yet dam construction takes 10 to 12 years. Pakistan has not built a major dam in decades. The Suez crisis and climate models show the stakes. Kuwait faces 2,500 to 6,000 cubic meters per capita per year and has contemplated relocating its capital. Pakistan is not yet Kuwait, but the trajectory is clear.

The missing regulator and the metering trap

One of Masroor’s sharpest observations concerns regulation. Every sector has one. Telecoms have PEMRA. Power has NEPRA. Energy has AUGRA. These bodies enforce service standards and hold providers accountable. Water has none.

“It’s the sweet will of a department of entity that he is giving the quality, the quantity, and the capacity of water today,” Masroor says. Without external accountability, performance depends entirely on the leadership of the moment. Transfer that leader and strategy evaporates.

Metering compounds the problem. A household in Islamabad pays a flat fee regardless of consumption. Why conserve? Muzamil notes that private communities run by residents themselves achieve far better outcomes. They meter, charge fairly, and maintain systems. The whole thing works because conservation makes economic sense.

What individual action can look like

Masroor closes with a call that is neither doom nor delusion. Pakistan faces a crisis that will not resolve through technology alone or through government action alone. It requires behavior change from individuals, investment from government, and innovation from private enterprise working in concert.

“I should not be expecting that my brother will do it or my father will do what to save water,” Masroor says. Start small. Fix a leaking tap. Conserve in the shower. Install drip irrigation on farmland. These are not solutions. They are signals. They shift the cultural assumption from “water is infinite” to “water is precious.”

Muzamil wraps by noting how water and sanitation shape every downstream outcome. Food security rests on irrigation. Health depends on clean water and hygiene. Industrial capacity requires reliable supply. For an economy trying to catch up with the world, this is not a nice-to-have. This is the foundation.