Earth is adorned with three ice caps :the Arctic ,the Antartic and the Himalayas. All three are melting with global warning.That is the inconvenient truth. Three years ago John Wall ,a former resident Director of the World Bank ,and a friend of Pakistan who bought a retirement house inside the walled city of Lahore facing the marble minarets of the Badshahi Mosque ,predicted that there will be more waters in the Indus and its tributaries for the next half century .The floods that devastated the Indus Valley last year bear out John Wall’s prophecy.
Unfortunately the Government is too busy trying to shore up its own longevity ,as if wish fulfilment of surviving for five years is an end in itself, to address the consequences .At the time when the Learned Prime Minister of Pakistan was pleased to appoint the writer of this Article as his Adviser with the status of the Federal Minister on Flood management a proposal was submitted to him in writing .1 received no answer and resigned. As another summer approaches, and the snows start melting on the mountain tops of the Mighty Karakorams and the eastern most Himalayan peak of Nanga Parbat,the national interest demands an answer to the question: What is to be done? The answer lies in building storage dams which also will provide us with cheap and reliable electricity for the next fifty years. By then new forms of energy will be harnessed and global warming arrested. As John Maynard Keynes famously said in the long run we are all dead.
No storage dams of any consequence have been built since Tarbelain consequence a WAPDA Study shows that in the past twenty years the share of Hydropower has been halved from sixty percent to thirty percent .Since thermal power is several time more expensive the electricity tariffs have shot up beyond the reach of the middle class.The same WAPDA Study estimates Pakistan’s economically viable Hydropower potential as 40000 Megawatts ,more than twice the present installed capacity.
To begin with the following sites have been indentified: Project River Power{MW} Yugo Syhok 1,000 Skardu Indus 4,000 Dasu Indus 2,712 Patan Indus 1,172 Bunji Indus 1,500 Thakot Indus 1,043 Basha Indus 1,500 Kalabagh Indus 3,600 Munda Swat 740 TOTAL 16,967 Megawatts Thus these feasible sites can almost double the total power in Pakistan. In order to allay the apprehensions of Sindh ,the lower riparian, the Dams should be designed only for storage and power and not for irrigation, though storage will augment power supplies in the lean winter season even for the benefit of Sindh if it is fairly managed.
The fears of lower riparian’s is as old as time. The second solution is that the WAPDA Act should be amended so as to trust powers to a Board of Directors with equal representation from all the Provinces. The office of Chairman should rotate with the first two being nominees of the Provincial Governments of Sindh and Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa. incidentally the martyred Prime Minister wished to build the dam at Kalabagh and call it the the Indus Dam. The Dam on the Indus in the gorge that runs Salt Range should be called Benazir Bhutto Dam in everlasting tribute to a Federalist Democrat who unified a grateful Nation
