The missing consensus

Once again, there are reports that the government may soon take a decision in favour of building a big dam on the Indus. President Pervez Musharraf has come out publicly in favour of the Kalabagh dam several times and emphasized the need for augmenting the capacity for water storage and power generation. Neither of the two needs can be ignored for the future. As the country’s population grows, so does the demand for more power for industrialization and domestic consumption. At the same time, more land needs to be brought under the plough to increase agricultural production. Yet, since the completion of the Tarbela dam decades ago, the situation has remained frozen as far as agriculture is concerned. Some power stations have been built using thermal and nuclear energy, but Pakistan’s biggest source of power — river water — has remained under-utilized. Meanwhile, the storage capacities of the Tarbela and Mangla dams have shrunk by 30 per cent because of constant silting. This has affected both energy production and the volume of irrigation water that is released downstream. There is, thus, no alternative to a big dam. The big question is how to go about it.The biggest hurdle in the way of a big reservoir upstream is the lack of national consensus on this sensitive issue. Two of the small provinces — the NWFP and Sindh — are opposed to it. The latter especially feels disturbed on several counts. Sections of the farming community in the province think the construction of a big dam will deprive it of its share of water and severely hurt those at the tail-end of its irrigation system. Then there are ecological considerations. Already, the decline in the volume of Indus water flowing into the Arabian sea has pushed the sea inward causing widespread salinity. This has ruined agriculture in large areas, affected marine life and devastated the mangroves. Any further cut in the Indus’s water would aggravate the situation. The government insists that this will not happen and that 8.6 million-acre feet of water will be released below Kotri to check sea intrusion and environmental damage. There are reports that the government may be able to secure the Sindh government’s approval, but that will hardly be called a step towards a national consensus. A major coalition party in Sindh, the MQM, is opposed to the Kalabagh dam, and — given the kind of general elections we had in October 2002 — the Arbab Rahim faction of the Sindh coalition can hardly claim to represent the majority opinion in Sindh.The point to note is that a national consensus does not exist at present, even though the party in power in the federal government is also the ruling party in three of the provinces. This being the current situation, one can imagine what the political scenario would be like after the general election in 2007. A ‘yes’ given by the Arbab-led government now may not necessarily be acceptable to the Sindh government that will come to power in 2007, and that will only make things worse. There is no doubt that a big dam is over due. It should have been constructed long ago. But, because of the political mess, a national consensus on it has not been possible. That still remains the main task. Going ahead with the Kalabagh or Bhasha dam without the agreement of all the constituent units will be a disaster, and it goes without saying that foreign donors will not commit aid to a politically controversial project.

Dawn