ISLAMABAD: The World Bank-assisted project to improve water use in agriculture is progressing satisfactorily as 13,637 watercourses in Punjab have been improved, exceeding the original target of 11,550 watercourses by 18 per cent.

Based on the current speed, the project will improve 14,896 watercourses by June this year, 29pc more than the original target, according to the project progress report released by the World Bank. The $250 million project will close by December 2021.

This is particularly meaningful in the current situation since watercourse improvement can create more employment for daily wage earners who lost their jobs in urban areas due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Watercourse improvements have repeatedly shown to yield an economic rate of return of more than 25pc, and benefits to laser land leveling and drip irrigation are even higher.

$250m World Bank-aided project will close by December

Watercourse improvement is also one of concrete ways to tackle the issue of “elite capture” in rural Pakistan, since the “tail-end users” can enjoy improved water accessibility after watercourse improvement.

Of the 140,000 total watercourses in irrigated areas of Pakistan, around 95,000 have been improved under various programmes supported by several donors. Punjab has about 58,000 watercourses in irrigated areas, out of which about 41,000 have been improved, leaving 17,000 in need of improvement.

The World Bank report says that construction of water harvesting ponds, a new activity introduced under the additional financing of the project, is on the track to fully achieve the design target of 500 by June 2021.

The target of 5,000 laser land leveling units has also been fully achieved. However, installation of high efficiency irrigation system is still behind the original target. The system has been installed on 71,250 acres of land with 8,800 acres in progress.

Many factors explain the relatively slow progress of high efficiency irrigation system such as risk associated to the new technology, high initial investment, the pandemic in 2020, etc. In the financial year 2021, the project management unit did make efforts to speed up the implementation of installing high efficiency irrigation system.

The report says that the development impact of the Punjab Irrigation Agricultural Productivity Improvement Programme is significant. The annual water saving from the project is four million acres feet, while it benefited 5.7 million farmers and promoted high value agricultural crops on 66,000 acres, creating 8.1m days of employment each year. Equally important, the project leveraged about $33m investment from private sector companies annually without considering farmer contribution.

The key irrigation sector issues are low surface water delivery efficiency; water distribution inequities; lack of storage capacity and control structures; wasteful on-farm water use; waterlogging and salinity; poor operation and maintenance and low cost recovery; and a constrained investment climate. These issues are a manifestation of institutional weaknesses due to near exclusive control by the public sector entities characterized by the usual inefficiencies of centralised bureaucracies, lack of corporate skills and poor client (farmer) focus and accountability.

Published in Dawn, February 8th, 2021