‘India planning to build more dams on western rivers’

India is planning to build more dams on the western rivers but has yet to share any information about its new projects with Pakistan, something it is required to do in accordance with the provisions of the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960. Water and Power Minister Naveed Qamar told the National Assembly in a written reply on Friday that according to the treaty, India was obliged to inform Pakistan six months in advance before the construction of new hydroelectric plants. Responding to a supplementary question, Qamar said Pakistan has already moved the Court of Arbitration on the Kishanganga Project and any future violation of the treaty would also be taken up at the appropriate forum. The industries minister told the House in a written reply that the Industrial Policy study commissioned by the Industries Ministry for 2009-11 had put the loss to industry at 13 percent of total manufacturing sales, or nearly Rs 130 billion per year. He said an independent study conducted in 2008 by the Institute of Public Policy, Beaconhouse University estimated costs of outages to the industry by surveying a sample of 65 industrial units. The survey was conducted in four main industrial centres of the country and included both continuous and batch-making industries. The estimated cost of load shedding for firms with self-generation facility was found to be Rs 74 billion, and for firms without self-generation, Rs 83 billion. Qamar told the House that currently there was no load shedding in the country because of balance in demand and supply. He said during the question hour that several large-scale power projects had been launched to meet the growing electricity requirements, and work on the Gomal Zam Dam would be completed by the middle of next year. He said this would be basically a water storage dam for irrigation purposes but would also add 17MW of electricity to the national grid. He said around 28 percent of work on the Neelum-Jhelum Hydroelectric Power project had been completed at a cost of Rs 28.8 billion. The project would be completed by mid-2016 and it would add 969MW of electricity to the national grid, he added.