Water, energy sectors take up bulk of new economic measures

An economic council in the Pakistan government has approved over two dozen development projects worth close to US $3.5 billion in a meeting by its executive committee over the weekend, with the bulk of the approved amount being slotted towards energy- and water-related projects, a government official said on Monday. “The Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC) approved a total of 28 development projects worth 193 billion rupees on Saturday,” Dr. Ashfaq Hassan Khan, the spokesman for the economic affairs division of the finance ministry, told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. Seven of the approved projects were energy-related and had been budgeted at slightly more than $1.1 billion, Khan said, adding that another six projects were water-specific and had been slotted into the budget at close to $1.7 billion. Water issues have dogged Pakistan of late, with a simmering controversy over the utilisation of water resources – especially the construction of a dam on the river Indus that the southern province of Sindh fears would deprive its population of much needed water – becoming so publicly acrimonious that it led to President Pervez Musharraf making a landmark speech in mid-September, in which he urged the building of a national consensus so that the country’s water requirements could be met for the next 50 years. Outraged politicians from Sindh and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) immediately announced the formation of a bloc against the construction of the controversial Kalabagh dam. The NWFP viewed a projected increase in water levels in the province’s agricultural areas with trepidation, fearing residential areas would be inundated and the local infrastructure destroyed should the dam be built, Haji Muhammed Aziz, a veteran politician with the Awami National Party (ANP) told IRIN, from the NWFP capital, Peshawar. But Musharraf stressed the importance of building four more reservoirs to meet the country’s burgeoning water needs, arguing that future generations stood to lose out if the Kalabagh, Bhasha, Skardu and Akhori dams, the plans for which were in the works, hadn't been made. On Monday, a leading English broadsheet, the daily Dawn, quoted a senior official in the country’s Planning Commission as saying that 10 major irrigation and water storage projects faced a huge financing gap between the projected cost of $8.2 billion against the total projected availability of funds that total $2.1 and are expected to tide the exercise over till the year 2011.