Advances in information and biotechnology, in conjunction with known technologies for improved water conveyance and application make it possible to shift to a demand-based irrigation system that promises gains in crop production per unit land and per unit water. It is also conceivable that marginal land could be released from crop production, reducing the volume of saline effluents that damage downstream land and necessitate an obsession with drainage that has so far yielded unsatisfactory results. Nonetheless, there are formidable structural and attitudinal barriers to this transition. How should a society still in the grip of feudal power and scourged by corruption and low levels of education re-mould itself to adopt the complex and demanding institutional structure that will produce environmentally-sound water management in the Indus Basin?
PIEDAR's premise is that the key institutional change is the devolution of responsibility for distributaries and canals to farmers' organizations and their federations. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can play an important role in encouraging this devolution by promoting a wide-ranging, inclusive, and vigorous discussion focusing on the basic theme of whose land and water is it anyway? Open and informed debate would almost certainly result in a societal consensus on devolution, and it should help resolve the key issue in devolution: should apolitical single-purpose organizations independently manage water resources? Or should water management organizations be imbedded in the participatory institutions of each of the 40,000 chaks (villages in the irrigated tracts) that form the base for democratic local government? A major factor inhibiting this enlightened institutional change is the existing set of corrupted institutions that grow in the dark. Vested interests thrive on uncertainty, distractions, and fear, in order to promote the need for more dams and allege the impossibility of reconciling the interests of head and tail users of a water conveyance system.
Reference: Qutub, S.A. & Nickum, James. (2002). Civil society and water management in the Indus Basin. RDD. 23. 109-121. UNCRD.
These questions led PIEDAR to a decade long field research in Khanewal district on promoting better irrigation management.