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| June 4, 2002 | Tuesday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 22,1423 |
Fast-drying Indus Delta devastates lower Sindh
THATTA, June 3: The non-release of water in the river downstream Kotri for about five years has destroyed agricultural lands, livestock and fisheries resources on which millions of people of the Indus Delta depend for their livelihood.
This was said by local experts while briefing a team of journalists, doctors, and social workers from Karachi and Thatta who visited the Indus delta here on Sunday to witness the ecological and environmental devastation as well as human sufferings sustained in the deltaic region as an aftermath of the non-release of water downstream Kotri.
The team, constituted by the People’s Doctors Forum (PDF), comprising Sindh PDF president Dr Karim Khwaja and general secretary Dr Ismail Palijo, and the journalists, Anwar Abro, Kamran Razi, Irfan Ahmed, Luqman Ahmed, and others, after a thorough visit observed that the rapidly vanishing Indus delta would cause devastations in lower Sindh.
The team was told that seawater had intruded some 50 to 60 kilometres in river water channels of Qalandari, Rohro, and Athrki Daryas downstream Kotri barrage.
The local experts, including Ghulam Mohammad Khatti, said the delta used to be spread over 3,000 kilometres in the past and the Indus of those times used to drop 150 MAF (million acre feet) of silt containing water in Arabian Sea through over a dozen riverine network trenches and creeks.
The flow of water used to bring one million ton of silt to the delta every day. However, the mangrove forests have been reduced from 1,850 million square feet to 1,000 million square feet over a decade.
The situation has also caused losses to the riverine forests of Thatta district, spread over 120,142 acres on both sides of the River Indus.
So for, some 1.2 million acres of agricultural land have been submerged in Thatta and Badin districts.
The average graph of fish catching which remained 200 tons per vessel in 1992 dropped to nearly 75 tons in 1998.
Due to vanishing mangrove forests, the shrimp hatcheries have also been reduced to nominal livelihood of 401,407 fishermen and their dependents, residing with in 100km of the coastline, were under threat.
The River Indus ranked 18th among the world’s biggest rivers but its delta was diminishing day by day while the other big rivers were developing 10 to 4000 acres delta every year.
Owing to this situation, some 15 to 20 thousand locals have so far migrated from Kharochan, Ketibandar Debelo, Sokhi, Padwari, Kun, Sultanpur and other Islands.
The Kharochhan, an 80 square kilometres Island and having a population of 20,000 at the droppage point of the Indus in the ocean, lacks facilities of sanitation, medical, police and revenue.
In emergency, particularly in cases of delivery or snake bite, they use to sail their families even in odd hours to far off Garho town and many times their boats sank, causing deaths.
The People’s Doctors Forum also established a four-hour medical camp at the Kharochhan Island and gave free medicines amounting to Rs50,000 to people.
The local experts were of the opinion that the rapid sea intrusion was the main cause of the poverty as the lands were being submerged, the mangroves and other forests were being vanishing and the fish catching areas were on the verge of extinction.
The experts demanded to release ten MAF water downstream Kotri, construct a coastal highway to be used as a sea embankment to open avenues of coastal development, develop jetties and to avert the possible erosion in the area due to sea intrusion.
The locals urged the IMF, World Bank and donors as well as philanthropists throughout the world to cooperate in materializing the proposal after study.
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