PESHAWAR: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Pervez Khattak revealed that the ‘billion-tree-tsunami’ introduced by the provincial government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is almost complete.
He was talking to Federal Minister for Climate Change Zahid Hamed at Pakhtunkhwa House, Islamabad on Thursday. Federal and provincial secretaries and other staff attended.
The total cost of the project is Rs 14 billion, out of which, Rs 10 billion had been spent on plantation drive and another Rs 4 billion required for looking after it.
He said that the province has the capacity to produce 70,000 megawatts of hydel power generation and 25,000 megawatts of electricity on run of the river. However, his government initiated different projects to produce 4,000 megawatts of electricity which would soon start bringing about 1000 to 1,500 megawatt of electricity to the national grid annually. We have a plan for the whole of Pakistan; it is our country and we have to protect it and stop its vulnerability in the backdrop of climate change, he remarked.
He said that his government introduced the culture of raising nurseries and sensitising the people towards tree plantation.
Pervez Khattak talked about the drive, dividing the whole province into three zones that included northern districts, central districts, and southern districts. He said that forestation was a national obligation and the people were taken onboard who became the real stakeholders in the whole drive.
Pervez Khattak said that his government had a lot of advantages feasible for hydel power generation projects. Regrettably, these were ignored in the past but his government started these projects for the production of cheap electricity adding that his leader Imran Khan has the vision to do justice to everyone and invest in human resource development, he added.
