No attention paid to political conflict over water: WB - Social sector needs being ignored
By Our Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD, March 31: The World Bank has raised serious questions on Pakistan's moves to simultaneously pursue a number of irrigation projects despite high demands for funds to support poverty reduction, social sectors and devolution reforms.
The bank is also surprised over non-inclusion of Kalabagh Dam in the future strategy for development of water and irrigation projects through the public sector development programme and has called for resolving debates over plans to develop water storage reservoirs.
"Kalabagh is the best and most well prepared site, but it is not part of the debate as it should be", says the bank in its latest report on Pakistan's 'Public Expenditure Management- Accelerated Development of Water resources and Irrigated Agriculture'.
On the question of building new consensus on water, it said: "While most of the debate has been about which major projects should be undertaken, perhaps the greatest challenge - the extent of political conflict over water and the breakdown of the last vestiges of a consensus on water, have received little effective attention".
The response of the main water agencies at both federal and provincial levels to the strategic questions and issues has been to propose a large number of investment projects collected through their un-financed portfolios, or that seem most important and immediate from their perspective on the problems - Wapda on new dams and canals, and the provinces on canal and barrage rehabilitation and modernisation as well as canal lining and for projects that would enable them to utilise their share of Indus Basin water.
"This creates a special problem for the government at a time of fiscal discipline......The problem is to know whether this growing mountain of projects contain the right projects, and to select projects for implementation with the right priority and in the right sequence", the bank said.
The challenges in the next three-to-five years are to address the disconnect between the key strategic issues in the sector, its current strategy and its investment portfolio.
This is essential not only to ensure that the sector is on an optimal and sustainable development path but to mobilise the resources to implement this strategy and investment plan.
Proposing to build all the storage sites available is not a response to the key question of the sequence in which storage should be added to the system, the levels of storage capacity to be added to the system over time, and what the new operating policy and water allocation should be.
"Very large sums are at stake, and the earliest projects should be selected to have the greatest impact on system operating performance (for both irrigation and hydropower) and on the implementation of the Accord, and the security, reliability, level and value of water supply".
Mangla (dam) Raising is too small and ill positioned not to invite even more intense controversy - in fact, just about every site and project that is proposed will have the same result because they are all proposed in isolation, the bank said.
Credible, alternative, comprehensive and long-term plans that focus on both the level and sequence of storage development, and alternative integrated operating policies need to be prepared which is the most urgent exercise separate from the feasibility studies of individual sites that is closely linked to the process of building a new consensus on water.
The report said that upto Rs600 billion are required for new canals, but "their economic, social and poverty impact appear to be marginally unattractive at best", notwithstanding the political commitment associated with these canals.
"Even though the new areas seen highly questionable as attractive sites for new irrigation development, the problem today is the lack of in- depth planning through which the projects might be reformulated and phased to overcome these problems and result in projects that make both economic and social sense if that is at all possible".
