Sindh is not short of water. It lets a year of it run to the sea.
The same province that ran a 50% canal shortfall in 2025 let more water pass Kotri to the sea in 2022-23 than its entire canal system takes in a full year.
Rivers: Natural Earth · Canals: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)
Flood and drought are the two ends of the same water. One lever answers both.
Sindh's rainfall is swinging harder: the driest year on record held 59 mm, the wettest 473 mm, an eightfold spread, and the wet years now cluster in the last decade. Two problems, one opportunity. The swing has to be buffered, and that is done by placing the right interventions at the trigger points, the few spots where each action carries the furthest.
A dried channel can run again. What we build it back to sets the scale.
Sindh has channels that once carried water, and the province has already started refilling one with the Dhoro Puran revival. Groundwater can add to that. How far a channel runs comes down to one clear choice, and a living seasonal stream is well within reach of a small slice of the flood.
What it would take
Delivering 0.8 km³ a year means on the order of 100,000 recharge wells plus about 2,000 km² of riparian spreading. Three times that reaches 2.25 km³ a year, enough for a functional Nara and a functional Dhoro Puran together. These are scale estimates for a first conversation, not a design.
The constraint that governs all of it
Recharge routes water, it does not create it. Sindh's stored water is already close to flat, so this only works if the water is captured from flood peaks, when the river is in spate, and released back as baseflow in the dry season. In the 2025 flood, about 18 km³ ran through the upper reach above a moderate cap; the 1 to 3 km³ this needs is a small slice of that. Reviving a channel this way is really flood water moved in time, the same operation that lowers flood exposure and flushes salt from the cropland alongside.
First-order scenario arithmetic, not a calibrated groundwater model. Orders of magnitude and the comparison between definitions are robust; the absolute lengths are estimates. A real answer needs aquifer tests, channel-bed survey and a flow model, which is the feasibility stage.
This is the first map, not the plan.
Everything shown here was built from open records and our own layer, without asking the province for anything. That is deliberate: it is how a first look should arrive. What follows is a sequence, and each step only happens if the one before it produced something worth acting on.
The data you already hold
Canal operations, reconstruction and land records, gauge and survey archives. The pre-feasibility begins on what already exists, nothing new to collect to start.
Backing for the ground work
Where the exact picture needs measurement the free data cannot give, backing to fill those gaps on the ground. A district map tells you where to worry; a located one tells you what to do.
A mandate and one focal point
An instruction that this is commissioned, and one named person to work through. The province keeps the data, the method, and the result.
Why the whole province, not one watershed
The lever only reads at province scale: the flood peak arrives from upstream, is held or lost through the canal commands, and what is left reaches the delta and the sea. A single watershed cannot answer whether Sindh can catch the peak and carry the dry season, because the water that matters is sent from above and lost below. The pre-feasibility is province-wide by necessity.
“Commission the first study, for all of Sindh. It tells you what can be kept, where, and what it would take, before any capital moves.”
LandIQ · Ali Bin Shahid · ali@landiq.earth · alibinshahid.earth. The province keeps the data, the method, and the result.
The full build is a live water room for the whole province.
What you have seen is a static demo, computed once from public data. The same platform runs live, and the three areas below sit beside it, already in the maps.
A live water room
A real-time feed of the province's water, the recovery and storage interventions mapped and tracked from proposal to built, and the wider land signals beside them.
Wetlands that clean the water on the way through
Riparian buffers and constructed wetlands strip nutrient runoff from farmland and settle urban sewage before it reaches the river and delta. The recharge programme already places about 2,000 km² of riparian spreading; on the drainage lines it doubles as treatment.
Mangroves that hold the delta and slow the salt
Delta mangroves fell from 667 to 628 km² between 1996 and 2016 as the sea rises about 3.5 mm a year at Karachi. They buffer surge, anchor the fishery, and slow the salt wedge. We map where restoration holds, and where returning captured flood as freshwater lets it recover.
Restoring the land to lift the rain
Ali's published work on the biotic pump: continental moisture is drawn inland by vegetation, so restoring upland and catchment surfaces can strengthen the moisture cycle that forms rain. A long-run, upstream lever, offered as a direction to explore, not a claim.
Every figure in this room traces to one shared master table, auditable line by line, alongside the 2025 monthly hydrograph above. Nothing here is asserted without a source.