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But Pakistan is not facing a water problem just because of climate change. Water conservation experts say the mix of improper resource management, groundwater depletion and insufficient water storage is pushing the system to a dangerous point.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Karachi, Pakistan’s most populous city, with a daily shortage of hundreds of millions of gallons of water. Despite this, water is consistently low priced: usage is unmeasured and many resources are unregulated.
Concerned about the future of water in the city, Rehman started working for AquaAgro, a technology startup founded in 2016. The company’s proposition was simple: use data to help farmers make better choices about irrigation schedules. Its devices, which include a solar-powered box and a thumb-sized soil meter, can monitor weather conditions such as temperature, humidity and pressure, and measure the moisture content of soil. All of the data was uploaded to a portal, and then farmers received mobile alerts telling them when to water their crops.
Crop yield increased 35% and water use decreased 50% on AquaAgro’s pilot farms. But when Rehman and his colleagues reached out to farmers about their products, they found that few people cared. “It wasn’t a viable financial model,” Rehman says. “Farmers were not motivated to reduce their water consumption because the price of water was so cheap.”
“It’s like a competition where everybody loses in the end.”
However, water is no longer as abundant a resource as it used to be. Farms in the Karachi region that rely on groundwater to grow their crops now use everything from sewage to water trucks to stolen surface water. Karachi’s main water utility complains that much of the city’s water is stolen from a 3,200-mile canal system that delivers water from a lake about two hours outside of the city. “There is a general perception that water is being used without permission by people on farms, amusement parks and informal settlements,” says Farhan Anwar, a Karachi-based city planner. However, he adds, “documentation is hard to find.”
Rehman hoped AquaAgro could help with Karachi’s water crisis. If the farms in the city used less water, maybe there would be some leftover for his children and his children’s children. But at the end of 2019, the team at AquaAgro concluded that their product may never be profitable. Their funding dried up and they soon dispersed.
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