Recommendations to Planning Commission on Water Issues

I bring devastating water and power issues to your personal notice crippling the economy of the country. You being head of the Planning Commission and your organization consisting of most highly educated, learned and experienced persons in every field are responsible for giving final approval to projects at ECNEC. This means PC accepts responsibility for correctness of the project planning concepts before giving final approval. The Prime Minister equally shares this responsibility with the PC. Multiple Water and Power issues are accumulating for the past 50 years. This is because, projects are not initiated, or wrongly planned, and executed. I therefore inform you of multiple crises accumulated since 1959.

 These crisis/issues are, water crises, power crises, land crises, rapid silting crises, super flood crises, water wastage crises due to obsolete canal irrigation system, crises due to absence of drainage system creating salinity, sodicity and water logging. It includes food and agriculture crisis, the natural surface drainage crises due to their blockage and encroachments and the crisis created due to wrongly conceived projects. My letter and its each paragraph will show you crises with facts. All Members of PC may discuss the crisis before passing them down. 

I am sure you and your organization will be shocked to know the hidden, the silent and the obvious crisis faced by the country even then most of us are unaware. WAPDA have brought the country to the brim of disaster. There is dire need to shift WAPDA Head quarter to Islamabad on the lines of IRSA so that it works closely with the PC, the IRSA, Water and Agriculture Ministries and others. This letter proves WAPDA has lost its professional ability.

As a first step remedy, I suggest to initiate building the 35-maf Katzarah Dam, generating up to 15,000 MW of power, controlling super floods in the Indus, irrigating 5 million acres of barren lands and controlling silt flow from the highly erodible soil of Skardu valley. Katzarah will have 1000 years life span. Along this, build the 8.5 maf Guroh Dop Dam, with a life span of 800 years on Panjkora River controlling super floods in Kabul River. It will irrigate 50.000 acres of land, generating 500 MW of hydropower. Munda Dam urgently proposed by WAPDA, is NOT flood control, as wrongly claimed by WAPDA. If the above two dams are built, the water, the power, the super floods, the silting, the food crisis would over.

It is fantastic, and highly disappointing that WAPDA specially created for Water and Power development, is unaware of the two greatest multipurpose dams that would have avoided load shedding and 2010-flood devastation. Climate change can bring another flood any time.

 Please bring these devastating issues to the personal notice of the Prime Minister, as he is responsible, but is not in the know as WAPDA itself do not know.