Water Day with the theme of ‘Sanitation’ was celebrated in Pakistan along with the rest of the world on Saturday. Water may make 75 percent of the earth but the fact is that the world is facing a shortage of this life giving resource. The increasing imbalances between the availability and demand, industrialization, degradation of ground water and surface water quality has rendered water insufficient.

But that is not the only problem. Inter sectarian competition; interregional and international conflicts all pose a threat to the scarce resource. While ground water may play a major role in meeting domestic demands for irrigation in arid and semi arid areas, groundwater mining and the lack of adequate planning and governance have opened up a new debate on the sustainability of groundwater resources.