PAKISTAN: POLITICAL ECONOMY AND POST-2000 DEVELOPMENTS---12

Irrigation resources are also considerably stretched, and Pakistan is now seen as a water

scarce zone. Some global warming projections projected a decline in water availability in the

Indus river system of the magnitude of startling 40% by mid-century. This threatens the very

survival of a population already swollen beyond sustainability. Pakistan has the largest

contiguous irrigation system in the world, and this provides the backbone of the Pakistani

economy. Efforts at decentralizing irrigation management to a more participatory mode, through

the creation in 1997 of statutory irrigation development authorities in Punjab and Sindh

provinces, experienced a failure of implementation under Musharraf. Specifically, there was an

inability, or unwillingness, in the face of vested interests, to push through the creation of

farmers’ organizations of local irrigators, and apex area water boards at canal command levels,

that were to take over operational management from the endemically corrupt and inefficient

irrigation departments surviving from the colonial period. Lately, the World Bank and the Asian

Development Bank are providing credit for water sector projects. There has been a pressure to

initiate the irrigation reform. New technologies also enable more accurate measurement of

water flows, and identification of water diversions and misappropriations. However, follow-up

legal action is resisted by the miscreant alliance of corrupt officials, on the one hand. On the

other, the larger water users that also permeate the power structure.

The discrepancy between stated policy goals and actual performance pervades other aspects of

public administration. Significant shortfalls in policy implementation are not confined to Pakistan

among developing countries, yet they seriously challenge the equity of high relative resource

absorption by ineffective public functionaries and their private sector associates. One glaring

example lies in the continuing failure in population planning and control. This is a vital variable in

Pakistan’s economic sustainability. From a base of 35 million in 1947, the country’s population

now exceeds 160 million; and the current projections will take it to well over 250 million by 2025.

The administration’s response has been to simply descend to untruths over the population

growth rate. This was reduced in official claims from 3.1% in the mid-1990s, first to 2.6% by

2000, to another neat downward adjustment of 0.5% to 2.1% by 2004, and to a more comforting

sub-2% estimate of 1.9% currently! There is no real explanation of how a 30% reversal in

demographic behaviour has come about. Meanwhile, with the census process in disarray, the

government remains oblivious of how many people there really are in the country. One equation

is very obvious, and officially acknowledged: over half of the population is under twenty years of

age. The demographic implications of such huge numbers reaching school age and