ISLAMABAD, Feb 2: The World Bank has estimated that Pakistan would need $60-70 billion to replace old water and irrigation infrastructure and offered substantial financial assistance to help replace the bulk of the country’s vulnerable water infrastructure on a priority basis.
Sources told Dawn on Thursday that the Bank believed Pakistan’s existing poor irrigation and water infrastructure was one of the major hurdles impeding the achievement of 7-8 per cent annual growth rate.
The World Bank major water structures in Pakistan were operating well beyond their design life.
“Pakistan has not sought any major funding during the last many years but the WB looks agreed to make available $2-4 billion for the replacement of water infrastructure, beside financing major dams,” a source said.
However, the bank was of the view that Pakistan’s government and the four provinces did not have modern asset management plan because of which there were no authentic estimates of annualized costs of replacing and maintaining the irrigation and water infrastructure.
According to the WB, Pakistan needed to bridge the maintenance gap of its existing irrigation and water infrastructure. From international experience, a typical figure — assuming regular maintenance — of replacement and maintenance was about three per cent of the capital stock of water infrastructure with roughly half of this being for replacement and half for maintenance.
Referring about Punjab (which has $20 billion of water infrastructure managed by the Irrigation Department), this would imply that the cost of replacement and maintenance of Punjab’s stock of water resource and irrigation infrastructure would be $600 million a year. It would, using the benchmark ratios, mean that Punjab should be investing an average of about $300 million a year in replacement and a similar amount in maintenance.
In fact there was no budget for replacement, and the government of Punjab budget for maintenance is about Rs1.2 billion, or about 6.5 per cent of the benchmark estimates of the cost of maintenance.
The WB, sources said, has advised the government to investing in priority for new infrastructure so that the required results relating to the progress and development could be achieved.
Relative to other arid countries, Pakistan has very little water storage capacity. While the United States and Australia have over 5,000 cubic meters of storage capacity per inhabitant, and China has 2,200 cubic meters, Pakistan has only 150 cubic meters of storage capacity per capita.
Also, whenever a major problem of a catastrophic nature takes place on a Barrage or a flood protection embarkment, lack of adequacy of maintenance funds is given as a standard case which in several cases would be valid while in others not quite so.
Deferred maintenance, the Bank maintained, has become a routine practice with provincial irrigation departments, which resulted either in a disaster or in a major repair and restoration undertaking in the shape of an independent project. Some recent events in the form of breaches in the first line of protective embarkments in Sindh and the current situation at Sukkur Barrage, were clear evidences of accumulated neglect.
