KARACHI, Jan 4: A forty-minute documentary film — Drowning Lakes — highlighting issues related to the construction of the Chotiyari reservoir in Sanghar district was screened at the PMA House here on Saturday evening.

The film, produced by Amar Mehboob Tipu, showed beautiful lakes, wetlands, migratory as well as endemic birds, wildlife including the hog deer of the endangered species, herdsmen grazing their livestock, fishermen busy in the lakes and farmers working in their agricultural lands.

According to the film, all these activities would be disrupted and destroyed as the new reservoir to hold nearly one million acre feet (MAF) water is being constructed to irrigate near 150,000 acres of land belonging to influential politicians, law-enforcement agency personnel and others in Umerkot area.

It said that due to the construction of embankment on one side and sand dunes on the other, nearly 100 square kilometres of land — or approximately 65,000 acres — would be submerged and nearly 6,000 people including fishermen, herdsmen and farmers would be dislocated.

Due to rise in the water level, many lakes would become submerged and the endemic species of shallow water plantation existing in the area would disappear.

It claimed that the survey carried out to register the victims of dislocation and evaluate the property for paying compensations to the victims was flawed as the survey teams did not even visit the whole area that may be affected and neither properly registered the names of people or their properties.

The film also included interviews of many people who alleged that payment of compensation was not properly made and some unaffected people were included in the list of victims and were paid hefty amounts. They also alleged favouritism as some people, according to them, were paid more than their share.

The people in their interviews said that they were the victims of the project but had not yet been paid any compensation. Some of them even maintained that they had not been registered as victims. They urged the authorities that the project should not be inaugurated unless they were properly compensated.

Criticizing the government, they said that it only obtained loans to implement projects without considering ecological losses caused to environment and even the victims were not fully compensated and rehabilitated as had happened with those dislocated by the construction of Turbella Dam.

They alleged that the victims of the Ghazi Barotha project, being implemented in the NWFP and Punjab, had been paid more compensation while the victims of the Chotiyari project were being paid less.

The project that was originally planned to be completed at a cost of Rs1.5 billion has not only been delayed by many years but would now cost more than twice that amount.