Protestors claim new canal will ruin farmers in Sindh

Environmentalists and politicians in the southern Pakistani province of Sindh are protesting against the construction of a canal in the eastern Punjab province, which is to irrigate land in Multan, saying it will reduce water for irrigation in Sindh, still suffering from the effects of three years of drought. "The diversion of water by irrigating so many millions of hectares in a non-irrigated and uncultivated tract of land is not justifiable when it is depriving the lower area of water where there is cultivated land," Nisar Khuhro, the provincial head of the Pakistan People's Party and member of the Anti-Thal Canal Action Committee (ATCAC), told IRIN from the southern port city of Karachi. ATCAC members held a protest rally on Tuesday in the part of Sindh they say will be affected once the canal is complete. "We will fight for our cause till the bitter end," Khuhro declared. To be sited in the Punjabi district of Sarghoda and built at a cost of about US $15 million, the canal is to have a capacity of 10,000 cubic feet per second (cusecs) of water, sufficing to irrigate up to 2 million acres of land. The water is to be drained from the River Indus, a move farmers in Sindh say would drastically affect them. The Indus, which has its source in the mountainous northern region, is the main lifeline of Pakistan's agrarian economy. Khuhro asserted that 2.2 million acres of arable land in Sindh had already been destroyed due to a dearth of water and the recent drought. "The construction would deprive us of another 2.2 million acres," he said. Punjab and Sindh provinces have always competed for the waters of the Indus, but Sindh feels neglected because Punjab has built many dams on the river for both irrigation and hydroelectric power. In February this year, the Sindh provincial assembly unanimously voted against the construction of the Thal canal, but in spite of this the federal government remains determined to implement the project, with its officials asserting they have the approval of the Sindh counterparts. "There was a meeting in 2001 in which all parties agreed to the construction of the canal," Zarar Aslam of the Ministry of Water and Power told IRIN in the capital, Islamabad. He maintained that the water for the canal would be taken from floodwaters expected this year. "We have had a very good rainfall so far this year," he noted. The government official said the protest was unjustified and had been fomented by "a few extremist elements that want to sabotage the project". "The environmental concerns raised have been dealt with," he added.