Driven by an unregulated network of over 1.5 million tubewells, Pakistan is hurtling towards a severe national water and food security emergency as annual groundwater extraction outpaces natural replenishment.
The country now extracts 65 cubic kilometers of groundwater annually against a recharge rate of just 55 cubic kilometers, making it the world's fourth-largest groundwater user and home to the second-most overstressed aquifer system globally, states the latest report by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE).
Today, nearly 60 percent of irrigation, over 70 percent of drinking water and almost all industrial operations rely on this vanishing resource.
Compounding the quantitative deficit is an escalating public health crisis: 70 to 80 percent of groundwater nationwide is unsafe to drink, with dangerous arsenic levels threatening up to 60 million people and salinity crippling 21 percent of irrigated land.
Titled "Pakistan's Groundwater Crisis: Policy Lessons and a Framework for Sustainable Resource Use," the study emphasises that the country's water distress is fundamentally a failure of policy and governance rather than a physical lack of water.