Waterlogging and salinity management in the Sindh Province. Volume three: Strategy for resource allocations and management across the hydrological divides.
1999
Rehman A. | Rehman G.
This study is part of an integrated assessment aimed at the remediation of the threat of waterlogging and salinity in the province of Sindh. The emphasis remains on non-capital intensive strategies that harken management-led reforms across the hydrological divides. This study, utilizing a digital modeling approach towards the determination of both ground and surface water balances, foresees adjustments to the cropped areas and yield growth rates as a balancing act between optimum crop production without the nemesis of environmental degradation. Such environmental safegaurds are essential to the peculiar, but stable, cropping patterns that have emerged throughout the province. Recurrent emphasis on high consumptive use crops has grossly disturbed the groundwater balance across much of the irrigated areas in the Sindh province to an extent whereby many of the deep-rooted crops like cotton and wheat have been replaced by rice and sugarcane. This has further compounded the already derelict situation for equity of surface water supplies, especially during the early Kharif season. Accordingly, remedial measures must concentrate on altering the water use patterns and demands that account for the existing canal capacities; provision of additional supplies is a politically sensitive issue that will entail high capital costs. The digital model used in this study has been useful to the extent that it has allowed projection of simulation results to the year 2010 that compare increased water availability (through Water Apportionment Accord), canal lining of saline groundwater zones and changes to the cropping patterns across the agro-climatic divides.
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