‘TBERM project main reason for flooding in Muzaffargarh’

ISLAMABAD: The flaws in the Taunsa Barrage Emergency Rehabilitation and Modernisation (TBERM) project was the main cause of floods in Muzaffargarh district and other nearby areas; local residents and civil society activists said.
They said that engineering flaws in the project destroyed the river environment, killed many people, led to the displacement of around 2 million people, washed away crops, animals, houses and other sources of livelihoods and caused losses worth billions to the poor people.
“The losses, that the remodeling of the project have caused to the people, if calculated, will be much higher than the original cost of the project,” Attaullah, a resident of Gurmani, a village devastated by the floods, told Pakistan Today.
Moreover, Attaullah said, “The loans given to Pakistan for the project by the World Bank are meant to be re-paid and if they are put together with the losses, the amount will be beyond imagination”. Ayub Rao, a resident of Kot Addu, said that the entire region was flooded by breaches in the embankment, which were directly linked with the TBERM, the main reason for deluge in the area.
Mushtaq Gaadi, spokesman for the Sindhu Bachao Tarla (Save the Indus Struggles), a movement of the indigenous fisher folk groups, riverine farmers, intellectuals and rights activists from the middle Indus Valley, said, “We remained concerned throughout the project implementation period (2005-2010) and expressed our views before the World Bank and Irrigation Department on the issues of involuntary displacement, project-induced flooding, killing of the Indus Dolphin during project implementation, coffer dam breach, etc. We also held protests outside Islamabad office of the World Bank to bring home our concerns”, Gaadi said.
“Last month we wrote a letter to the World Bank in this regard and submitted ‘The Indus Indictment’, a document describing how the TBERM devastated the region,” he said. Providing details, Gaadi outlined the five demands made in the Indus Indictment:
1. Establishing an independent investigation commission to ascertain the specific causes of the structural failure of Taunsa Barrage.
2. Judicial enquiry, currently undertaken at the Lahore High Court, on embankment breaches and other aspects of the Indus floods in Punjab, should be an open, public hearing and official reports and data submitted should be accessible by all as its current secretive modality is unacceptable.
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3. The World Bank should cancel the payment of the project loan in order to allocate it entirely for flood recovery and reconstruction in Muzaffargarh district.
4. The World Bank and Asian Development Bank, steering Flood Damages and Needs Assessment must have consultation and participation of flood-affected groups in the process and the World Bank should recommend flood tax on urban property and other sources of wealth only, instead of the poor people.