ISLAMABAD, May 27: World Bank’s neutral expert, Professor Raymond Lafitte, will hold his first meeting with India and Pakistan in Paris on June 9-10 to address differences between the two nations on Baglihar dam project being constructed by New Delhi on the Chenab River in occupied Kashmir.
Government sources here told Dawn that the neutral expert had asked the two countries to send their teams to the meeting to finalize procedure of the proceedings during the two-day meeting.
The sources said authorities in Islamabad had received Professor Lafitte’s notice on Friday. The same had also been sent to India, they said. The Ministry of Water and Power, the Foreign Office, the Law Ministry and Pakistan’s commissioner to the permanent Indus Commission would hold a meeting in a couple of days to finalize a strategy and select a team to represent Pakistan before the neutral expert.
Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz is expected to preside the meeting.
On April 10, the World Bank had appointed Raymond Lafitte, a Swiss civil engineer, as the Neutral Expert ‘to address differences’ between Pakistan and India on the Baglihar hydropower project on the Chenab river, which Pakistan considered violated the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960.
This is the first time in the 45-year history of the Treaty that the World Bank has appointed a neutral expert to address a dispute between the two countries. Raymond Lafitte, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, will make a finding on a ‘difference’ between the two governments concerning the construction of the Baglihar project.
The appointment was made through a consensus between the two countries. The Chenab River is one of the rivers comprising the Indus river system. After the partition of the subcontinent, the Indus Waters Treaty was concluded with support from the World Bank in 1960.
The Treaty divided the river systems between the two countries. The Bank is a signatory to the Treaty and, earlier this year, was approached by Pakistan to appoint a Neutral Expert to deal with a difference that had arisen between the two countries.
Under the terms of the Indus Waters Treaty, the determination of neutral expert will be final and binding. The Swiss professor has about 17 publications on dams and hydroelectric power plants to his credit.
