The recent report published in the national English press states that World Bank has declined to fund Bhasha Dam for the next five years i.e., up to 2019. This puts us back to square one alongwith Kalabagh dam. The nation has been led up the garden path by dangling Bhasha dam carrot before its eyes since 2006 when the first so called ground breaking was done of the dam and now we are told it is linked with NOC from India. The people of Pakistan have been befooled and dust thrown in their eyes by keeping KBD on back burner and now hopes of Bhasha dam are dashed to the ground with little hope of retrieval. There is a report in the National Geographic Journal of May 2014 that a hand-made dam was constructed in India by 125,000 workers in 1972 on India’s Krishna River without any imported machinery and simply by muscle power. The dam, named Nagarjuna Sagar, was 407 feet high and more than half a mile long which is the largest masonry dam in operation in the world. Would our benighted economists and engineers draw any lesson from the above report?
DR M YAQOOB BHATTI
Lahore