Environment vs. Infrastructure: The Cholistan Canal Project Debate
"We will continue fighting against these canals and won't let the state kill us by thirst." — Wajahat Hussain, Sindhi human-rights lawyer, at a March 2025 protest in Hyderabad.
That sentence is why this canal is not an engineering story. It is the story of what happens when a federation builds with one province's water and another province's land — and the paperwork can no longer hold the two apart.
What is actually proposed
The canal is the flagship piece of the Green Pakistan Initiative, the federal agriculture programme launched in February 2025. The plan: a 176-kilometre main canal plus two branches, diverting 4,120 cusecs from the Indus basin into the Cholistan desert to irrigate roughly 1.2 million acres of South Punjab rangeland. Price tag: $783 million, around Rs 218 billion. Construction began in February 2025 — and was paused at the end of April, when the matter landed before the Council of Common Interests, the constitutional body that must approve any inter-provincial water project. As of 2026 it remains deferred, with a scaled-back federal draft circulating.
The promise
Islamabad's case is food and foreign exchange: a country that spent over $5 billion importing wheat and edible oil in one fiscal year, flood-season water running unused to the sea, and millions of acres of desert that could grow wheat, cotton and exports instead. GPI officials argue that South Punjab's rural economy transforms with irrigation, jobs and agro-industry. The argument is real. Pakistan's import bill is a genuine wound.
The fear
Sindh, as the lower riparian, reads the same river and sees theft. The 1991 Water Apportionment Accord promises 10 million acre-feet of flows downstream of the Kotri Barrage to hold back sea intrusion; in practice less than a tenth of that reaches the delta, against roughly 80 MAF a century ago. Mangroves, fisheries and delta farmland are already degrading, and the province fears the canal finishes the job. The Sindh Assembly passed its resolution against the scheme in March 2025, strikes followed in July under the Save Indus Delta banner, and petitions sit in the Sindh High Court. No public Environmental Impact Assessment has ever been released — the single fact that turns critics' caution into anger.
WWF-Pakistan has warned that canal irrigation on desert soil invites waterlogging and secondary salinisation, while Cholistan itself is not empty land: nomadic pastoralist communities, traditional rainwater harvesting in earthen tobas, and wildlife from the houbara bustard to the chinkara gazelle and caracal.
Who said what
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Jr. called it "not a people-centred initiative" but a for-profit scheme for cash-crop irrigation. Maj-Gen (r) Shahid Nazir, the GPI director-general, answers that the priority is domestic wheat and a smaller import bill. Hammad Naqi Khan of WWF-Pakistan argues that irrigation without strategic planning worsens water insecurity, and Mustafa Mirani of the Sindh Abadgar Board says Sindh will not sacrifice its delta so corporate farms can grow sugarcane in Cholistan.
The honest middle
Three outcomes remain plausible: a full build if the CCI ever consents (hard without Sindh), a scaled-back pilot with drip irrigation and solar pumps on a fraction of the acreage, or a halt-and-rethink that starts with a published EIA and a delta restoration fund. The cheapest first step is transparency: release the assessment, audit the water accounting, and let both provinces read the same numbers.
Water used as leverage over a population is an old and ugly politics, and Palestinians in Gaza live its sharpest version — taps that answer to decisions made elsewhere. A country that resolves its own water disputes justly will know exactly what it is protecting.
We plan domestic trips for people who want to see the argument with their own eyes — the Rohi's tobas at golden hour, the delta's creeks near Keamari. HTG Travels turns headlines into places; the desert makes a surprisingly persuasive guide.
