Mario Puzo, author of the book ‘Godfather’, tells of a Russian crew at a filming location. One of the crew members picked up a water tap lying on the ground, tied it to the fence post with a piece of twine and opened the tap to get water. Puzo says, to the Russian the water tap itself was the source of water, he had no clue as to the backup equipment – water tank, pump, pipeline etc – that was needed between the source of water and the water tap to get water to the tap.
The same kind of logic is being exhibited by the powers-that-be in Sindh, they are busy repairing or replacing pipelines, going after the illegal hydrants, tackling the tanker mafia etc, completely oblivious of the fact that the source of water itself, the reservoirs of Mangla and Tarbela, are drying up, more and more silt where there was more and more water.
They probably are not aware that during the lean period when there is little or no water in the rivers for nine months, it is the water stored in the dams which feeds Kotri barrage, which feeds Keenjhar lake, and which feeds Karachi.
In the time that a 6.1 maf capacity dam will take to build, Tarbela dam will have lost capacity equal to it. If we start building today, we will only recover the lost capacity and be in the same position that we were in 40 years ago, with the difference being that then we had only 8 crore mouths to feed.
ENGR KHURSHID ANWER
Lahore
