DURING the 2025 monsoon, surplus Sutlej floodwaters were diverted from Islam Headworks into the abandoned Old Mailsi Canal—not to irrigate fields, but to recharge the aquifer beneath them. Equipped with 144 recharge wells, the pilot project stored nearly 12,000 acre-feet of floodwater underground, turning an obsolete canal into a vast freshwater bank. In one remarkable intervention, a flood was transformed into a strategic reserve. That experiment should not remain a local success story; rather, it should be scaled up as a regional blueprint.
For more than seven decades, India and Pakistan have looked at the Indus Basin through the same narrow lens: whoever controls the rivers controls the future. Every dam is viewed as a strategic signal, every barrage as a political statement and every fluctuation in river flow as evidence of hostile intent. Consequently, water has evolved from a natural resource into an instrument of statecraft. Yet, while both neighbours remain locked in disputes over rivers, a far greater crisis is quietly unfolding beneath their feet.
The Indus Waters Treaty divided rivers, allocated flows and laid down engineering rules, but it left groundwater, wetlands, floodplains and managed aquifer recharge largely out of the equation. It solved yesterday’s problem while leaving tomorrow’s challenge unaddressed.
India’s rapidly depleting aquifers in Punjab and Haryana illustrate the dilemma. As groundwater levels continue to fall, pressure inevitably builds up to maximise available surface water. Pakistan, meanwhile, whose agriculture depends heavily on the western rivers, interprets every upstream intervention through the prism of survival. As a result, a domestic groundwater crisis on one side spills over into an international water dispute on the other. The cycle feeds on itself: depleted aquifers increase dependence on rivers, while greater dependence on rivers deepens strategic mistrust.
Yet the annual monsoon also points the way forward. Every year, torrents of floodwater sweep through villages, wash away crops and eventually drain into the Arabian Sea. We fight floods in summer only to grapple with water shortage in winter. Instead of rushing floodwaters out to sea, why not bank them underground?
That is precisely what the Old Mailsi Canal pilot has begun to demonstrate. The canals of the future need not remain irrigation canals; they can evolve into recharge canals. By channelling monsoon flows into recharge basins, restored floodplains, wetlands and infiltration corridors, they can help nature refill depleted aquifers.
What engineers once wrote off as seepage can, in carefully selected locations, be turned into strategic storage. Many paleochannels, abandoned canals and former river courses that fell into disuse after the Indus Waters Treaty could become valuable Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) corridors. Their sandy and gravelly beds are often highly permeable, allowing floodwaters to infiltrate rapidly into underlying aquifers.
The Old Mailsi Canal points towards the age of aquifer restoration. If the last century taught South Asia how to divide water, this century must teach it how to store it. Only then will India and Pakistan break out of the surface-water trap and emerge as partners in safeguarding the vast freshwater ocean that lies beneath their shared basin.
—The writer is a political analyst, based in Islamabad.
