[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

dam-l DAMMING the PEOPLE of the INDUS



>From creed@awara.khi.sdnpk.undp.org  Thu Jul 30 12:06:41 1998
>
> DAMMING the PEOPLE of the INDUS
>
> Aly Ercelawn (creed@awara.khi.sdnpk.undp.org)
> Karamat Ali (b.m.kutty@cyber.net.pk)
> Omar Asghar Khan (omar@oak.sdnpk.undp.org)
>
>     For many years, Presidents and Prime Ministers of Pakistan would
> have us believe that a another large dam on the Indus -- now at
> Kalabagh downstream of Tarbela dam -- is a harbinger of national
> prosperity. This suggestion has been roundly and repeatedly rejected
> by people of all provinces except Panjab which directly benefits from
> the dam project. Immediately after presiding over the first-ever
> nuclear test explosions by Pakistan last May, PM Nawaz Sharif become
> emboldened enough to commit the federal government to building
> Kalabagh dam. His announcement was met yet again with widespread and
> sustained protest across the country. Sitting on the fence, former PM
> Benazir Bhutto agrees that the dam is a good idea but Panjab should
> get other provinces to see the light.
>
>     With 6 MAF storage, Kalabagh dam will be the third large dam in
> Pakistan after Tarbela (also on the Indus) and Mangla. At a cost
> of over $6 billion (excluding new canal systems), the new dam is
> designed to bring many thousand acres of Panjab and NWFP land under
> cultivation, and produce as much as 3000 mw of hydel power. Where
> will the dam get its water from? The federal irrigation agency, WAPDA
> (Water and Power Development Authority), has a simple answer: the dam
> will use water that is now "wasted" by flowing into the sea through
> the southern province of Sindh.
>
>     The federal government argues that Kalabagh dam has a particular
> urgency to speed economic recovery in Pakistan. International
> sanctions against nuclear tests have exacerbated an already weak
> economy. Food security is threatened, and privately generated thermal
> power is too expensive. According to government, self-reliance
> demands the Kalabagh dam, whose engineering plans have been ready for
> many years. It dismisses the need for a comprehensive environmental
> impact assessment of the dam.
>
>     Pitted against the federal government and the Panjab establishent
> are the peoples of the remaining three provinces of Pakistan --
> Sindh, NWFP (North-West Frontier Province), and Balochistan. Both
> NWFP and Sindh protest that Kalabagh dam will bring immediate,
> widespread, and irreversible damage to their lands and forests.
> Water-starved Balochistan fears that its plans to expand agriculture
> from current shares of Indus waters will come to naught. Hoping to
> defuse tensions, the Prime Ministers seemed to have agreed to
> proceed with the dam project only with unanimous agreement of all
> four provinces. But, called upon to evolve a consensus, federal
> ministers and agencies have shown a distressing disregard of their
> primary obligation to safeguard the federation.
>
>     Leading the evangelists for Kalabagh dam, WAPDA confines itself to
> proclaiming the dam's necessity and feasibility; casually dismisses
> the concerns of adverse impacts; and stubbornly refuses to
> acknowledge better alternatives to meet the dam's objectives -- all
> in defiance of resolutions against the dam by three provinces as well
> as the Senate Standing Committee on Water & Power. Fearful of
> repeated rejection of the dam by the Indus River Systems Authority,
> the President has now ordained that this oversight body will now be
> entrusted to loyal servants of the State rather than nominees of
> public representatives of the provinces.
>
>     Spokesmen for Panjab and the federal government base their crusade
> for Kalabagh dam on the following grounds. First, a rapidly growing
> population and feeble economic growth need more water and energy to
> fuel agricultural and industrial growth. Second, the dam will
> irrigate additional lands and produce electricity through Indus
> waters otherwise wasted. Third, people of Panjab and NWFP displaced
> in the vicinity of the dam can be compensated adequately. Fourth,
> there will be no other significant adverse impacts upon people or the
> environment anywhere else in Pakistan. Fifth, Kalabagh dam is
> economically superior to other feasible alternatives for increasing
> food and energy supplies.
>
>     This note explains why Kalabagh dam will be both inefficient and
> inequitable use of the federation's resources. The dam is unnecessary
> because there are superior alternatives. If built and used as
> planned, the dam will benefit a small number of people but impose
> enormously high costs on a substantially larger number of people now
> as well as in future generations through large-scale environmental
> degradation. The note ends by proposing specific steps towards a
> democratic process for resolving such conflicts.
>
> ADVERSE IMPACTS
>     Through land lost to the reservoir and seepage, the
> dam will directly displace between one and two hundred thousand men,
> women, and children. After the dismal performance of WAPDA in
> compensating and resettling a substantially smaller number of people
> displaced by Tarbela dam, Ghazi-Barotha Hydropower Project, and
> Chotiari Reservoir project, there is absolutely no reason to believe
> that the federal government and its agencies have the will, resources
> and capacity to tackle an enormously larger number of people
> displaced by Kalabagh.
>
>     WAPDA makes much of a lower dam height and sophisticated water
> release techniques in order to protect nearby cities and villages
> (in Nowshera district) from the heightened risk of damage by floods.
> Witnessing the outrageous conduct of WAPDA during earlier floods when
> it put Mangla dam ahead of people downstream (in Jhelum), the
> communities of these regions refuse to place their lives and
> livelihoods in certain jeopardy at the hands of dam engineers.
>
>     All dams cause the water table to rise in surrounding areas.
> Kalabagh dam will be no exception. Substantial areas of the central
> districts of NWFP and Potohar plateau of Panjab dam will be rendered
> waste through water logging and salinity. Such communities are
> unlikely to receive anywhere close to adequate compensation because
> WAPDA has not historically been very responsible in these matters.
>
>     As has been observed in many international dam projects, the most
> pronounced but also most neglected are downstream adverse impacts.
> WAPDA asserts that there will be no such significant effects of
> Kalabagh dam. When the people of Sindh contrast the history of Indus
> flows recorded by WAPDA with water allocations in the Water Accord
> between provinces, they can only conclude that WAPDA is
> self-servingly casual about the evidence of adverse impacts. It will
> be an extremely  rare year in which Indus floods are large enough to
> utilise the dam without reducing current allocations of flows to
> each province. Years of normal flows will permit Kalabagh dam and
> associated new irrigation schemes to be used only by reducing the
> allocations to Sindh and Balochistan. Their political clout will
> ensure that upland agriculture and urban supplies are always
> protected. In which case, the people of Indus delta will bear the
> brunt of damage to their lands and forests through reduced freshwater
> flows and increased sea water intrusion. It is a travesty of national
> development to build Kalabagh dam by the forced destruction of the
> lives and livelihoods of millions of people in the lower riparian
> region of Pakistan.
>
>     Concerns of the Indus delta have unfortunately received short
> shrift by the infrastructure lobby. It is not just Kalabagh, but any
> additional storage dam or barrage anywhere on the Indus that is a
> grave threat to the livelihoods of millions of peasants and
> fisherfolk along the Sindh coast - because such diversions of
> freshwater promise to devastate the dwindling natural resources of the
> delta. These are not imaginary fears; it is Mandarins of the State
> who treat people of the coast as invisible victims of their
> "development" agendas. Ever since the construction of the Sukkur
> Barrage in the 1930s, and continuing with the barrages and dams into
> the 70s, the Indus delta has been steadily deprived of fertile silt
> and freshwater which nourish its land and forests. Commercial
> interests of upland agriculture and "cheap" energy production have
> colluded with construction carnivores to take cover behind the
> self-serving myth of using "water flowing wasted into the sea."
>
>     In discussing the impact of the Provincial Water Accord of 1991,
> IUCN's Peter Meynell bluntly stated that the Indus Delta was already
> on the "brink of ecological disaster." This bleak assessment led him
> and other experts to recommend a minimum flow of around 30 MAF
> downstream of Kotri barrage. Sindh irrigation expert, and former
> Senator, Kazi has argued time and again that historical records of
> WAPDA establish that total availability of Indus flows cannot
> satisfy committed allocations. In consequence, any additional
> upstream reservoir such as Kalabagh will either lie unfilled in all 5
> out of 6 years, or the Indus delta will be lucky to get even a measly
> 10 MAF of water in only 1 of 6 years. After the inequitable 1991
> Water Accord and the 1997 National Finance Award it should be obvious
> who will be made the sacrificial goat by Islamabad.
>
>     Do dammers in the mountains and plains really want to transform
> the Indus delta into "a desiccated place of mud-cracked earth, salt
> flats, and murky pools," as the Colorado delta has become for the
> Mexican "people of the river... who are at risk of extinction?" This
> is the bleak outcome of the Colorado River being so heavily dammed
> and diverted in the western US that "it literally disappears into the
> desert before it reaches the sea."
>
> SUPERIOR ALTERNATIVES
>     Except to construction carnivores, Panjab's enthusiasm for the
> dam is inexplicable in the face of a number of well-known
> alternatives that will cost less money and completely avoid the
> massive human and environmental costs of another dam. Reducing waste
> within the irrigation system is an obvious measure, since at
> least half of the water is lost to evaporation, seepage, etc. At
> more than 1100 cm per capita, Pakistani agriculture gobbles more than
> half as much as what Egypt uses and 3 times more than what India
> consumes by way of freshwater. One estimate is that measures for
> lining water courses, land levelling and the like will cost only 10%
> of the cost of getting the same water from Kalabagh dam. All water for
> new cultivation in Panjab can therefore be recovered from investing
> in conservation measures for its own current share of Indus waters.
> This would be cheaper and pose no threat to other provinces.
>
>     The present WAPDA power system incurs line losses of no less
> than 25% in transmission and distribution. Clearly, investments in
> reducing this waste are cheaper than building more capacity only to
> lose another one-fourth again. In addition, present generating
> capacity is already underutilised by a large margin, and a surplus is
> likely to remain when the Ghazi Barotha Hydropower project comes on
> stream in a couple of years. When getting power to the villages is a
> priority, decentralised projects of wind and solar power need to be
> taken far more seriously by provincial and federal governments.
>
>     A recent study by TAMS and HR Wallingford for WAPDA compares the
> cost of desilting Tarbela dam with building Kalabagh dam. It
> concludes that desilting Tarbela dam and reducing future
> sedimentation will cost nearly one-half of Kalabagh dam to achieve
> the same irrigation and energy objectives. Action towards desilting
> Tarbela will also go some way in restoring the natural fertility
> regime of the Indus.
>
> DEMOCRATIC RESOLUTION
>     A just and equitable water policy would become easier to plan and
> implement only when citizens strive to give priority to communities
> over the nation, to territory over the centre, and to the federation
> over the state. This democratic vision suggests some concrete steps.
>
>     First, and most importantly, federal as well as provincial
> governments must announce a complete moratarium on any more dams and
> barrages.
>
>     Second, the federal government and provinces should constitute a
> National Water Commission. Its terms of reference should be two-
> fold: to examine basin-wide social, economic, and environmental
> impacts of all existing and proposed irrigation and drainage systems;
> and to propose alternatives for expanding irrigation and power
> supplies. To be credible, the Commission should be headed by an
> expert from the non-governmental sector, with commissioners
> representing dam affected communities, NGOs, technical experts, and
> provincial governments. The recently formed World Commission on Dams
> can be of much assistance to the National Water Commission.
>
>     Third, public representatives should subsequently ensure broad-
> based public discussion and debate of the Commission's findings, with
> a view towards informed consent of communities affected by any water
> projects, including Kalabagh dam.
>
>     Fourth, federal and provincial legislators would ensure that all
> water projects are given public hearings in Standing Committees, and
> endorsed by provincial assemblies before qualifying as a subject for
> negotiations at any federal forum.
>
>     Fifth, federal legislators would proceed with federal funding of
> only such projects as have received the Commission's approval, been
> given provincial ratification, obtained unanimous agreement in the
> Council of Common Interests, and gained subsequent approval by
> the federal Senate.
>
> ----------------
> The authors are partners of the creed alliance in Pakistan, an
> advocacy group for efficient and equitable reforms in development. Aly
> Ercelawn used to be a senior economist at the University of Karachi;
> Karamat Ali heads the Pakistan Institute of Labour Economics and
> Research; Omar Asghar Khan leads the SUNGI Development Foundation.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> No matter how cynical we get, we just cant keep up
>
> creed  (http://sangat.org/creed)
> citizens alliance in reforms for efficient and equitable development
> 44 Darulaman Society 7/8    Sharea Faisel    Karachi  PAKISTAN
> ph (9221) 453-0668  452-8884  499-0566  fax 454-9219 499-0566 777-2752
>