Two Cultures Workshop: Water & Power

Two Cultures Workshop: Water & Power was the inaugural workshop of the Two Cultures Institute, held at LUMS from 26 to 31 January 2026. Twenty-five participants were selected from over 1,100 applicants.

The workshop examined Pakistan's water and power sectors as two intimately linked systems. Since the founding of Pakistan, the two have been intertwined — early electricity projects were designed primarily to lift agricultural water, and major dams were planned as dual-purpose investments serving both irrigation and hydropower.

Today both sectors face acute, interconnected crises: circular debt exceeding PKR 2.6 trillion, some of the region's highest grid tariffs, per-capita water availability falling from around 5,600 m³ in 1947 to under 1,000 m³ today, floods causing damages of 2–3% of GDP in major disaster years, and agricultural overuse accounting for over 90% of national water withdrawals.

These crises are not parallel. Electricity choices shape water allocation; agricultural pumping shapes power demand; climate variability stresses both. Yet the academic, professional, and bureaucratic worlds addressing them remain siloed. The workshop was designed to bring those worlds into the same room — and to ask why technical fixes alone have not resolved the problems.