The PPP government is giving top priority to Bhasha dam unmindful of its many limitations. It will not utilise the huge flows of Kabul, Chitral, Swat, Haro and Soan rivers, which only Kalabagh dam can. Similarly, it will not moderate the floods in these rivers which will keep creating havoc every year in south Punjab and Sindh. Being outside the monsoon range it will not utilise any of the 30 million acre feet annual monsoon flows. It will be dependent entirely on snow melted from the glaciers which have a projected life of 30 years only. It will be too little too late, at best a replacement for Mangla and Tarbela dams which will have lost considerable capacity for storage and generation by the time it is commissioned in 12 to 15 years. It was not without reason that Kalabagh dam was given top priority and was the first dam to be built under ‘Wapda Vision 2025’. Sindh will get the same share of water from Kalabagh dam as Punjab. The PPP government should stop misleading the people, tell the people the truth and let them decide.
In its original design Bhasha dam had a height of 650 feet and could store only 5 million acre feet, which was less than the storage capacity of Kalabagh dam. To give it priority over KBD, the height has been increased to 920 feet to store 7 maf. The material of construction and the mode of construction have also been changed to reduce the period of construction. This makes the 920 foot high dam in an active seismic region extremely hazardous. A mishap would wipe out the whole of the Indus Valley right up to Kotri in Sindh.
A mishap is guaranteed, sooner or later….
I wish the print media would take notice and carry out investigative reporting to pressurise the government, contact numbers of experts can be made available.
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