Central leader of Pakistan Peoples Party and senior provincial minister Nisar Ahmed Khuhro said the ‘Kalabagh Dam has been a controversial project for a long time.’ Khuhro said this while addressing participants of a National Security workshop on January 8, 2014 at the Sindh Secretariat.
Kalabagh Dam is a proposed hydroelectric project on the Indus River at Kalabagh in the Mianwali District of Punjab. The project has become highly controversial and two provinces, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, oppose the construction of this multipurpose dam which, if built, will generate some 3,600 MW electricity.
In 2004, a former military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, announced the building of the dam in the larger interest of Pakistan, but he has had to abandon the idea due to political pressure from all quarters.
On May 26, 2008, the then-Minister for Water and Power Raja Pervez Ashraf - he later became prime minister of Pakistan - said Kalabagh Dam would not be constructed and that the project had been cancelled in response to demands from a majority of national and provincial assemblies, except that of Punjab. Due to opposition from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, and other stakeholders, the project was no longer feasible, he said.
However, when the flash floods devastated vast lands in Sindh, Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2010, the former prime minister from Raja Ashraf PPP, Syed Yousuf Raza Gillani, said that the floods would not have been so devastating if the Kalabagh Dam had been built.
The resistance to Kalabagh in Sindh is widespread. Even the PML-N’s Sindh Chapter agree with opponents of the dam, leading the incumbent prime minister Nawaz Sharif to retreat from his position [of building the dam at all cost], vowing instead to accommodate Sindh’s point of views.
Senior Sindh Minister for Education, Nisar Ahmed Khuhro, told Truth Tracker that Kalabagh Dam would not be built at any cost as it had become a controversial project.
“Experts have identified more than 16 sites ideal for the Run of the River Power generation projects, but we have wasted 35 years just debating the issue of Kalabagh Dam,” he said.
“The 1991 Water Accord has many flaws and it has yet to be decided how much water will have to be released into the sea to avoid sea water intrusion and to save millions of acres of fertile land from degradation,” he added.
PML-N leader and deputy-speaker of the Punjab Assembly, Sardar Sher Ali Gorchani, told Truth Tracker by phone that the PML-N government will support the construction of Kalabagh Dam project until the people of Sindh support the project. “An All Parties Conference (APC) shall be arranged to reach a consensus on the construction of the dam,” said Gorchani.
“The PML-N will never force its decision on any province, but will persuade the other three provinces and political forces to sit together and develop consensus on the Kalabagh Dam as we did on the issue of terrorism,” he said.
A prominent social worker, Zulfikar Wahoocho, talking to Truth Tracker said the people of Sindh would never accept the construction of Kalabagh Dam on the River Indus. “It is a matter of trust, as Sindh does not trust in Punjab, which the past violated several agreements on the water issue,” says Wahoocho.
While citing examples of China and India, Zulfikar said recent studies proved that large dams cause more harm to the environment than benefit to the people. He advised that the government scrap the KBD project forever.
On the basis of historical background information and the views expressed by experts and political leaders, Truth Tracker finds that Kalabagh Dam is a controversial project and that the statement of Nisar Khuhro is true.
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