Contesting the Core: Peripheral Social Resistance to Extractive Canal Projects

Abstract

Pakistan’s Indus Basin has entered a phase of absolute water scarcity, with per capita availability falling below 860 m³ amid accelerating glacial retreat, erratic monsoons, and a system-wide deficit of approximately 21 percent in 2025. Under these conditions of ecological contraction and demographic pressure, water governance in Pakistan has increasingly taken the form of what Paul Gellert conceptualizes as an extractive regime, wherein the state working through military linked institutions and elite economic actors reorganizes land and water through large scale infrastructure in the name of food security and national resilience. Within this extractive logic, climate change operates as a threat multiplier, a core insight of environmental security theory, intensifying competition over shrinking flows and magnifying the consequences of upstream diversion. The US$3.3 billion Six Canals project, launched under the Green Pakistan Initiative to irrigate 4.8 million acres of arid land primarily in Punjab, exemplifies the expansion of a new hydraulic frontier. Projected upstream diversions of 2–3-million-acre feet threaten to deepen Sindh’s chronic shortfalls averaging 19 percent since 2014 and reaching 43 percent in 2022-23, while advancing without meaningful provincial consensus or transparent reassessment of climate altered allocations, underscoring the hydro-political asymmetries embedded in Pakistan’s federal water regime. From a human security perspective, the externalization of scarcity downstream translates into heightened livelihood insecurity, salinity intrusion, displacement pressures, and social vulnerability, particularly for agrarian and deltaic communities. The 2025 Babarloi Bypass protest, which paralyzed approximately 45 percent of national freight and inflicted losses exceeding PKR 70 billion, illustrate a characteristic outcome of extractive regimes under scarcity: localized grievances over water access rapidly escalating into national economic disruption and political confrontation. Together, Gellert’s extractive regime framework, environmental security theory, hydro-political analysis, and human security perspectives reveal how hydraulic infrastructure in a drying basin ceases to be a technical solution and instead becomes a structural driver of federal strain. Without enforceable real time telemetry, binding downstream consent for major new projects, and climate-adjusted allocation rules, the Six Canals risk converting Pakistan’s historic lifeline into a mechanism of cascading instability eroding livelihoods, deepening provincial polarization, and steadily undermining the constitutional foundations of the federation.

Keywords: Extractive Water Governance, Federal Stability, Climate-Induced Scarcity, Indus Basin Political Economy, Internal Security, Supply-Chain Vulnerability.