Focus on the dams dispute in Pakistan

A simmering dispute over the construction of hotly disputed dams slated to be built to cater to Pakistan's burgeoning water needs became public over the weekend, following President Pervez Musharraf's 50 minute speech on television and radio in which he urged the building of a national consensus on the issue so that the country's water requirements could be met for the next 50 years. "By 2050, we will have to have three to four large water reservoirs. If we do not act now, there will be a shortage of drinking water, agricultural growth will suffer, the economy will be affected and poverty will deepen further," Musharraf said in his speech on Saturday night, appealing to the people and political leadership of the southern province of Sindh and the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) - both of which are deeply opposed to the building of the Kalabagh Dam: one of the dams slated to be built on the River Indus - to support the construction of the water reservoirs. On Sunday, politicians from Sindh and the NWFP announced the formation of an anti-Kalabagh Dam Front, as well as opposition to the Thal Canal, a flood-water-based irrigation project for a poor, desert region in the central Punjab province. "The Kalabagh dam will increase the water level in the agricultural areas of the NWFP. If that happens, we won't get any crops, residential areas will be inundated and our infrastructure will be destroyed," Haji Mohammed Aziz, a veteran politician with the Awami National Party (ANP), a leading political party in NWFP, told IRIN from the provincial capital, Peshawar. The majority of Pakistan's federating units - Sindh, the NWFP and Baluchistan - were against the construction of the Kalabagh dam, with only the Punjab, long considered the sole beneficiary of any water-related decisions made at the federal level, being perceived as the sole beneficiary of the reservoir's construction, Aziz said. "It would be a threat to national integration, to the integrity of Pakistan. Three out of four provincial assemblies have passed unanimous resolutions condemning the proposed building of the Kalabagh dam, so if it were to built, there would be trouble," Ayaz Palejo, a lawyer and member of the advocacy group, Pakistan Network of Dams, Rivers and People (PNDRP), told IRIN from the southern Sindhi city of Hyderabad. "It would create problems for the population of Sindh. We'll end up having no water. Even right now, the water available is insufficient for irrigation: you need an abundance of water for irrigation purposes in the months from June till October and, for the last seven, eight years there has been an acute shortage of water in these months," Palejo added. Pakistan does need more water reservoirs to fulfill its requirements, but World Commission on Dams (WCD) guidelines needed to be followed to ensure the implementation of the water projects was up to par, Hammad Naqi Khan, the director of the Environmental Pollution Unit (EPU) at the World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-P), told IRIN from Lahore, the capital of Punjab province. "We can't say dam A is right and dam B is wrong. All government bodies and international agencies should follow World Commission of Dams (WCD) guidelines: look at the social ramifications of such projects before proceeding. For example, there are lots of people who were uprooted by the building of the Tarbela Dam in the seventies and are still to be compensated. We'd have to ensure that that doesn't happen again," Naqi, who just returned from Paris after attending a WWF-International moot on its Living Water Programme, stressed. In his landmark speech running to almost an hour on Saturday, Musharraf didn't touch on political issues at all, focusing instead on stressing that Pakistan would face an acute shortage of water by the end of the decade, both for irrigation and drinking purposes. "To meet our water needs over the next 50 years, we will have to construct four water reservoirs: the Kalabagh, Bhasha, Skardu and Akhori dams," he said, adding that future generations stood to lose out if a decision wasn't made in time. Last week, Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, Pakistan's Minister for Water and Power, told IRIN that the rapidly dwindling capacity of the country's three main water reservoirs -Tarbela, Mangla and Chashma - was an issue of grave concern, with the storage capacity of the facilities rapidly depreciating due to silt, adding to the deficit in Pakistan's water resources. "The loss is about 25 percent," Sherpao said, adding that he had undertaken some aerial reconnaissance of Tarbela, one of the world's largest earth-filled dams situated about 80 km northwest of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, and had been alarmed to see what appeared to be an island of silt nearing the dam. The first dam to be built on the mighty river Indus, which meanders a long, and now controversial, route through the length of Pakistan, before disappearing into the Arabian Sea, Tarbela is vulnerable to the large amounts of silt it receives. Mangla dam, built on the river Jhelum, about 120 km south of Islamabad, is also eroding, an International Union for the Conservation of Nature-Pakistan (IUCN-P) spokesman told IRIN from the southern port city of Karachi last week. "We should have a dam built upstream of Tarbela. Books, studies, engineer recommendations suggest that the age of the Tarbela dam will increase by another 30 to 50 years if that is done, because Tarbela will be spared the siltation and sedimentation it suffers from presently," the ANP's Aziz said. The Indus river is one of the largest sediment producing rivers globally. This is due to its proximity to glacial landscapes and the erosion caused by steep-sided slopes. It has been estimated that the Indus and its tributaries bring millions of cubic metres of sediment into the system annually. Building a dam upstream of Tarbela would act as a holding cell for the silt and minimise the impact, Farhan Sami, the IUCN official, had said last week, as he described extensive watershed management programmes which had been undertaken to reduce the levels of silt flow but which later ran into financial difficulties. In late August, President Musharraf ordered the formation of parliamentary and technical committees charged with resolving provincial water problems, appointing a technocrat with years of expertise in handling water issues to head the technical committee. Regional rivalries in water allocation have manifested themselves most prominently in a Sindh-Punjab water dispute, with the southern province often accusing the Punjab of using up more than its share of allocated water. Water from the five major rivers flowing through the Punjab is stored in roughly 17 million acre-feet of storage space available and faces an annual demand for over 100 million acre-feet of irrigation water. In his speech on Saturday, Musharraf said water issues had been politicized as he urged all the provincial leaderships to develop trust and confidence in each other and focused on the importance of the construction of canals to irrigate barren lands, before declaring that work on at least one of the dams he mentioned would start by next year. "Whether it's large or small, before building a new dam, we should ensure that a proper, scientifically-done Social and Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is carried out," WWF's Naqi Khan stressed.