Lahore83,000 Cholistan acres lack water for incoming leaseholders.
Pakistan’s Punjab land-lease scheme rents state allotments at Rs100; the Rs150,000 market rate makes them a windfall for insiders, 36 farmer groups warn.
Punjab’s government has set no water-infrastructure timeline for Cholistan’s barren tracts.
Sources: Dawn
THE COLONIAL TEMPLATE
Punjab's land-allotment machinery is inherited from the British canal colonies of the 1880s-1900s, when the Raj built the Triple Canals and parceled out millions of newly-irrigated acres to favored military veterans, loyalist tribes, and revenue collaborators. The Board of Revenue's allotment files, the district-magistrate signature, the nominal lease rate — every administrative step in the current scheme has a direct ancestor in Lyallpur and Montgomery a century ago.
WHY CHOLISTAN IS EMPTY
The Cholistan is the Pakistani extension of the Thar Desert, a sand-dune belt south of the Sutlej. It is empty not because no one wanted it but because the Sutlej itself is empty — the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty assigned the Sutlej, Beas, and Ravi to India, which built dams that strangled downstream flow. Pakistan's eastern rivers are now seasonal trickles, and the canal system that would irrigate Cholistan was never finished.
THE PEPPERCORN-RENT MECHANIC
A nominal rent — Rs100 per acre against a market rate of Rs150,000 — is not an error; it is the mechanism. The gap between the official price and the real price is the patronage. Whoever receives the allotment captures that spread instantly, by subletting at market or by sitting on the land until a developer arrives. The same pattern shows up in housing-society land, mining licenses, and CPEC industrial-zone allocations across the country.
WHO ACTUALLY FARMS PAKISTAN
Roughly 90% of Pakistan's farms are under 5 hectares; smallholders work the majority of cultivated land but own a shrinking share of it. The 1959 and 1972 land reforms set ceilings on holdings but were riddled with family-transfer loopholes, and the 1990 Qazalbash Waqf ruling by the Federal Shariat Court declared land ceilings un-Islamic — effectively ending redistribution as a political project.
THE CORPORATE-FARMING TURN
Since the 2009 Corporate Agriculture Farming Ordinance, Islamabad has actively courted Gulf sovereign capital — Saudi, Emirati, Qatari funds — to lease Pakistani farmland for food security at home. The Green Pakistan Initiative announced in 2023 placed Cholistan tracts under military-civilian joint management explicitly to attract these investors. The 83,000 dry acres are the visible edge of a much larger pipeline.
THE WATER ARITHMETIC
Pakistan is one of the most water-stressed countries on earth — roughly 1,000 cubic metres per capita per year, against a 1,700 scarcity threshold. Cotton and sugarcane, the crops most likely to be planted on new corporate tracts, are among the thirstiest. Allotting desert land without a water plan is not an oversight; it shifts the cost of finding the water onto whoever gets the lease, which in practice means deepening tubewells into an already-falling aquifer.