By Dr. Nayyer Ali

Building Dams


January 27, 2006

Last week two major events in Pakistan occurred simultaneously. Mishandled, they could have pushed the country into significant civil unrest and perhaps even threatened Musharraf’s grip on power. But in the end, he appears to have made the correct choices again, and retains a firm hold on the country. The first event was the missile strike by the US that killed 18 people in Waziristan. I will write about that next week.
The second event, but the one that was far more important in the long run, was the announcement of the government’s agenda on damming the Indus. For the last few months, Musharraf and Aziz have been conducting a public campaign to build support for damming the Indus, Pakistan’s largest river.
The Indus has already been dammed once, at Tarbela, but that was over 40 years ago, and that dam is no longer sufficient for water management. Pakistan’s natural water supply comes from summer snowmelt in Kashmir, and the late summer monsoon. This fills the rivers but in a seasonal pattern. Without dams, much of the water runs to the ocean and cannot be saved for use in the winter crop season. Dams don’t increase the total amount of water a river can provide over a whole year, but they allow that supply to be saved and used later, and allow wet years to provide for dry ones.
There are two large dams that the government wanted to build. Kalabagh is south of Islamabad, and located downstream from Tarbela. It is well positioned to catch and hold monsoon rainfall. Bhasha Dam is located much higher up the Indus in Azad Kashmir near Gilgit, and is too far up the Indus to catch much of the monsoon rain, but is positioned to capture the snowmelt of the Himalayas. It is located well above Tarbela. While there has been little opposition to Bhasha, Kalabagh Dam has generated controversy. This is primarily due to the fear that a large dam there would allow Punjab to control the distribution of water during the monsoon season, and it would connive to do so to the detriment of Sindh particularly. Musharraf however has argued that without Kalabagh, Sindhi farmers will face critical water shortages for winter crops within a decade. Conversely, there is no real use of the water above Bhasha, and it will have to be released downstream, so it does not generate the fear that Kalabagh does.
In the end, Musharraf announced that both dams have been given the green light, but that Bhasha will be built first. This was probably the wisest move. By building Basha, he at least gets Pakistan back into the business of dam construction, and if the process is done correctly, will make building Kalabagh more politically feasible. Hopefully, both dams will be built in the next ten years.
Another side benefit to the dams will be cheap power. Total installed generating capacity in Pakistan is about 20 gigawatts (it is about 800 gigawatts in the US), and if all the dams were built it would add another 10 gigawatts of very cheap hydroelectric power to the national grid.
The dams actually are not necessary for “national survival”. They are primarily needed to manage irrigation needs for farmers. Even without the dams there is plenty of water for household and industrial use. It is farming that needs vast quantities of water that only the dams will make available. Even in agriculture though, there is a vast scope to more efficiently use water. Some of the rhetoric on this has been overdone by Musharraf and his team, but in the end, building the dams is in the national interest, and the correct choice has been made.
Comments can reach me at Nali@socal.rr.com.

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