ISLAMABAD, Sept 6: President Gen Pervez Musharraf is likely to perform the twice-delayed ground-breaking ceremony of the Mangla dam raising project in the last week of this month, sources told Dawn on Friday.

The president will also preside over a meeting next week to approve a hefty package of compensation and rehabilitation for the people affected by the raising of the dam by 40 ft.

The project will cost Rs59 billion and will double its water storage and electricity generating capacity.

Around 40,000 people, living upstream of the dam in Mangla raising project and Chak Swari villages in Mirpur district, will be displaced.

Wapda, under government instructions and on the demand of the AJK government, has finalized a comprehensive package of about Rs20 billion for the affected people, official sources said.

The package also provides for the final payment to those people who were displaced when the dam was originally built.

It is not clear whether the federal government/Wapda have agreed to the demand of the AJK government and its people to award the net profits income share from the power generation project, as was done to the NWFP in relation to Tarbela dam.

In a meeting, held with the federal minister for information and Kashmir affairs Nisar A. Memon on Friday, it was decided that the president will perform the ground-breaking ceremony.

The meeting was attended, among others, by the chairman Wapda Lt-Gen Zulfikar Ali Khan, acting prime minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir state Pir Mumtaz Gilani, and the ruling Muslim Conference president Sardar Ateeq Ahmed Khan.

This meeting was a follow up of Nisar Memon’s meeting with the AJK president Sardar Anwar Khan the other day, who had advised the government to wait for the ailing premier of AJK Sardar Sikandar Hayat Khan to return from abroad.