Thatta, Pakistan – On a sunny afternoon at Dando Jetty, a small fishing village in Pakistan’s sprawling Indus Delta, a boat is being unloaded and another is about to leave for the Arabian Sea.

The melodious voice of Sindhi folk singer Fouzia Soomro rises from a loudspeaker playing on a nearby parked boat.

About 130km (81 miles) from Pakistan’s largest city of Karachi, Dando Jetty sits on the bank of Khobar Creek, one of the two surviving creeks of the Indus River in Thatta, a coastal district in the eastern Sindh province.

“There should be freshwater in this creek, flowing into the sea,” Zahid Sakani tells Al Jazeera as he embarks on a boat to visit his ancestral village, Haji Qadir Bux Sakani, in Kharo Chan, a sub-district of Thatta, three hours away. “Instead, it’s seawater.”

Six years ago, Sakani, 45, used to be a farmer. But his land, along with the rest of Haji Qadir Bux Sakani village, was swallowed by the sea, forcing him to migrate to Baghan, 15km (nine miles) from Dando Jetty, and turn to tailoring for survival.

Now, the Kharo Chan port wears a deserted look – no human beings in sight, stray dogs roam freely, and abandoned boats outnumber those that are still in service. Sakani sometimes goes to Kharo Chan to visit the graves of his father and other ancestors.

“We cultivated 200 acres [81 hectares] of land and raised livestock here,” said Sakani as he stood at the port. “But all were lost to the sea.”

Kharo Chan was once a prosperous area comprising of 42 “dehs” (villages), of which only three now exist. The rest were submerged into the sea, forcing thousands of people to migrate to other villages or Karachi city.

According to the government census, Kharo Chan’s population shrunk from 26,000 in 1988 to 11,403 in 2023.

It was not only Kharo Chan that met this fate. In the past decade, dozens of villages in the Indus Delta have disappeared, swallowed by the advancing sea.

New canal projects

And now, a new threat has emerged in an already fragile ecosystem.

As part of a so-called Green Pakistan Initiative, the Pakistan government is seeking $6bn investment from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain over the next three to five years for corporate farming, aiming to cultivate 1.5 million acres (600,000 hectares) of barren land, and mechanise the existing 50 million acres (20 million hectares) of agricultural land across the country.

The project aims to irrigate a total of 4.8 million acres (1.9 million hectares) of barren land by constructing six canals – two each in Sindh, Balochistan, and Punjab provinces. Five of those canals will be on the Indus, while the sixth will be constructed along the Sutlej River to irrigate the Cholistan Desert in Pakistan’s most populous Punjab province.

According to the 1960 Indus Water Treaty, a World Bank-brokered water distribution agreement between India and Pakistan, the waters of the Sutlej primarily belong to India. It is one of the five rivers that originate in India and fall into the Indus in Pakistan. Along with the Sutlej, the waters of the Ravi and Beas Rivers also belong to India under the treaty, while the waters of the Chenab and Jhelum, apart from Indus itself are Pakistan’s.

However, the Sutlej does bring water to Pakistan during the monsoons in India, with Cholistan historically reliant on rainfall for irrigation.

“They will divert water from Indus to Sutlej through Chenab and then to Cholistan canal,” said Obhayo Khushuk, a former irrigation engineer. “You cannot build a new irrigation system depending on [monsoon] floodwater.”

Meanwhile, corporate farming has already begun in Cholistan under the Green Pakistan Initiative, with the authorities approving 4,121 cusecs of water to irrigate 0.6 million acres (24,000 hectares) of land in the Cholistan Desert – an area larger than Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city.

Mohammad Ehsan Leghari, Sindh’s representative in the Indus River System Authority (IRSA), a regulatory body established in 1992 to oversee the allocation of water to Pakistan’s four provinces, strongly opposed the move.

“From 1999 to 2024, not a single year has passed without water shortage in Pakistan, with Sindh and Balochistan provinces facing up to 50 percent water scarcity during the summer. In this situation, where will the water for the proposed canal system come from?” he asked.

In a letter to the Council of Common Interest (CCI), a constitutional body authorised to resolve issues between the federal government and provinces, the Sindh government also criticised the project, saying that IRSA had no right to issue certificates of water availability. CCI is headed by the prime minister, with the chief ministers of the four provinces and three federal ministers as its members.

Sindh’s Irrigation Minister Jam Khan Shoro warned the Cholistan canal would “turn Sindh barren”. However, federal Planning and Development Minister Ahsan Iqbal said that the Sindh government’s objections were “baseless” as new canals would not affect its share of water.

But Hassan Abbas, an Islamabad-based independent water and environment consultant, calls the Cholistan canal an “unscientific” project. According to him, building a canal system needs even and steady land, not sand dunes as present in Cholistan.

“Water does not know how to climb a sand dune,” Abbas said.

The delta’s destruction

The mighty Indus River has been flowing for thousands of years and once cradled one of the earliest known human civilisations spread across modern Pakistan, Afghanistan and India.

But as the British colonised the subcontinent two centuries ago, they also engineered the river, building dams and diverting its course. After independence in 1947, the same colonial policies were followed by successive governments, as more barrages, dams and canals led to the destruction of the Indus Delta – the fifth largest in the world.

“A delta is made up of sand, silt and water. The process of the destruction of the Indus Delta began back in 1850 when the Britishers established a canal network. Every canal built in Pakistan, India or China since contributed to the destruction of the Indus Delta,” Abbas told Al Jazeera. The Indus originates from the Chinese-controlled Tibet region, where China has built a dam on the river.

According to a 2019 study by the US-Pakistan Center for Advanced Studies in Water, the Indus Delta was spread over 13,900 square kilometres (5,367sq miles) in 1833, but shrunk to just 1,067sq km (412sq miles) in 2018 – a 92 percent decline in its original area.

“A delta is like an open hand and its creeks are its fingers that fall into the sea,” Sakani said. “The space between those fingers is home to millions of people, animals and other creatures, but it is rapidly shrinking.”

As more and more land got degraded, residents were forced to migrate upstream. But not everyone could afford to move. Those who remained in the Delta switched from farming to other professions, mainly fishing.

Sidique Katiar, 55, a resident of Haji Yousif Katiar village near Dando Jetty, became a fisherman some 15 years ago.

“I remember there used to be only a few boats in our village. Now, every household has boats [and] the number of fisherfolk is growing day by day,” he told Al Jazeera.

Loss of livelihood

At Sanhiri Creek along the Arabian Sea, a seven-hour boat journey from Dando Jetty, about a dozen makeshift huts are inhabited by the so-called “fishing labourers”.

Nathi Mallah, 50, a resident of Joho village in Thatta’s Keti Bandar area, is one of them. She shoves a small iron rod into a jar of salt and then inserts it into the sandy ground. She waits briefly before pulling the rod back, quickly grabbing a small aquatic creature locally known as “maroarri” (razor shell in English), because of its long, narrow and rectangular shape, resembling an old-fashioned razor.

Mallah works with her husband and six children to catch “maroarri”, which the fisherfolks say is only exported to China. None of Mallah’s children go to school as the family works for 10-12 hours a day for a local contractor, who provides them some salt and drinking water.

Marroarri sells for 42 Pakistani rupees (15 US cents) a kilo and each member of the Mallah family collects about 8-10kg daily, earning them enough to survive. Nathi entered the business some five years ago when their fishing profession in Joho went into losses.

Muhammad Sadique Mallah, Nathi’s husband, says increasing land degradation pushed people to switch from farming to fishing. “There are more fishermen on the sea than there used to be in my youth,” the 55-year-old told Al Jazeera.

A 2019 report by the World Bank says catches of fish dwindled from 5,000 tonnes a year in 1951 to a meagre 300 tonnes now due to the Indus Delta’s degradation, forcing Pakistan to face a loss of $2bn annually.

“There was a time when our men would go to the sea and return in 10 days,” said Nathi. “Now they don’t come back even after a month.”

No water for crops

Allah Bux Kalmati, 60, lives in Dando Jetty where he cultivates tomato, chilli, some vegetables, and betel leaves. He says freshwater is only available during the two months of the monsoon season.

But Kalmati’s betel-leaf garden needs water every two weeks. “It has now been a month and there is no water for the plants,” he says.

According to the Water Apportionment Accord (WAA) of 1991, an agreement between Pakistan’s four provinces on sharing water, at least 10 million acre feet (MAF) of water has to be discharged annually down the Kotri Barrage, the last diversion on Indus, for the downstream deltaic ecosystem.

In 1991, the Switzerland-based International Union for Conservation for Nature, however, recommended a release of 27MAF annually – a goal that could never be materialised. Moreover, IRSA data showed that water flow was less than 10MAF during 12 of the past 25 years because officials diverted it elsewhere before it reached the sea.

“Ten MAF water is not enough for Indus Delta. It received 180 to 200MAF water annually before the canal system and it requires the same amount of water to survive,” said researcher Abbas as he attributed the water shortage to dams and barrages.

“We have 10 percent more water than the last century. But building canal after canal has diverted the flow of water, resulting in waterlogging upstream and sedimentation in the dams,” he said.

Mahmood Nawaz Shah, president of a growers’ association in Sindh, said Pakistan’s irrigation system has become “old and outdated”. “Our average grain production stands at 130 grams per cubic metre while it is 390 grams in neighbouring India,” he said.

Shah explained that instead of expanding the irrigation system, Pakistan needs to fix the existing water network and better manage the resource. “Pakistan utilises 90 percent of its water in agriculture, while the world’s usage is 75 percent maximum,” he said, citing an International Water Management Institute study.

“There are areas where canals are available but water doesn’t reach when required. Take for example the Indus Delta. You don’t have water for the existing cultivable lands. Pakistan should learn how to save water and increase its production.”

Back at Dando Jetty, Sakani has just returned after visiting his ancestral village in Kharo Chan. Before heading home, he wanted to buy some fresh fish at Dando, but no boat had arrived from the sea that day.

“There was a time when we would distribute palla [hilsa herring] among the beggars,” he said. “But now, we can’t get fish at this place.”

Meanwhile, the high tide makes Khobar Creek look like the sea, now only 7-8km (4-5 miles) from Baghan, Sakani’s new hometown.

“The sea was 14-15km [8-9 miles] away when we shifted here from Kharo Chan,” he told Al Jazeera. “If there is no freshwater left downstream, the sea will continue to erode the land and, in the next 15 years, Baghan, too, will perish. We will have to move again to another place.

“More canals and impediments to Indus River would completely block the flow of water into the sea. It will be the final nail in the coffin of the Indus Delta.”