Quetta
Receives half its daily water needs from 30,000 illegal wells draining an aquifer that drops 2-5m/year — mining the wrong resource because insurgency blocks access to the right one.
Quetta needs 60 million gallons of water per day and receives 31.5 million — a 47% shortfall that the city fills with 30,000 illegal tube wells draining an aquifer that drops 2-5 metres annually. The water table has fallen from 50 metres below the surface to over 150 metres in two decades, and no one is stopping the extraction because there is no alternative.
The capital of Balochistan sits on enormous mineral wealth — copper, gold, marble — that could fund a modern water system. But the Balochistan Liberation Army launched 254 attacks in 2025 alone, a 26% increase over the previous year. A railway station suicide bombing killed 32 people. Coordinated assaults reached within one kilometre of the chief minister's office. The minerals stay in the ground because the security situation makes extraction impossible.
Quetta sits on billions in mineral wealth it can't mine because of insurgency, so it mines the only resource it can reach — groundwater — at catastrophic rates.
This is the double resource curse: the city is mining water to survive while its mineral mining potential remains locked by violence. The Mangi Dam, set for completion in 2026, will add only 8.1 million gallons per day — a fraction of the deficit. Each year the aquifer drops further, pumping costs rise (requiring an estimated 40% more energy by 2040), and the gap between supply and demand widens.
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor designated Quetta as one of eight core cities, promising railway connections and industrial zones. The ML-3 railway from nearby Bostan to Kotla Jam would connect Balochistan to the national transport network. But the western route upgrades have stalled due to funding gaps and security risk, and the Reko Diq copper-gold deposit that Barrick Gold was meant to develop remains commercially unreachable.
Quetta demonstrates what happens when an organism extracts its most critical resource because it cannot access any other. The locust analogy is precise: the population consumes the immediate resource base faster than it regenerates, not out of ignorance but because the alternatives are physically blocked. When the aquifer fails — and at current extraction rates, it will — the city faces the kind of phase transition that no infrastructure project can reverse.