YOUR editorial `Water warnings` (March 22) asks Isra to give input of what more needs to be done to encourage the judicious use of water. In the same issue Rachid Banmessaoud, World Bank, country director, says that 20 to 25pc of our water gets lost and calls for making every drop count.
Although I am no water expert, common sense dictates that we must conserve and use whatever we have. We lose about 12.8 MAF of sweet water through seepages in our watercourses. Mangla and Tarbela dams` combined capacity is about 14 MAF.
It means we lose an equivalent amount of water from our watercourses.
Arresting water seepages from these watercourses is the easiest and quickest way of damage control rather than waiting for five years to make new reservoirs. They can be done in parallel.
Water loss of millions of acre feet can be controlled by converting our kutcha watercourses into pipes. A pipe-making firm in South Asia sells most of its plastic pipes to the agricultural sector. Instead of a three-foot-wide weed-infested watercourse with trickling water, the farmers use 16-inch-diameter plastic pipes, with gushing water to reach longer distances without a drop being lost. We can make a start today.
