December 11, 2006	Monday	Ziqa'ad 19, 1427

THE prime minister has ordered an inquiry into the Kachi Canal for its wrong planning. The canal is being executed without proper planning and investigations and suffers from faulty design and wrong alignment which has escalated its cost from Rs31 billion to Rs70 billion.

No procedural code has been observed... This practice of wrong planning is not new with Wapda. It has been observed that the project planning concepts and designs of the Scarps, the NDP and the LBOD are faulty and dangerous and have failed wasting Rs750 billion.

However, no such inquiry had been ordered to ascertain the causes of their failure. Besides these, the Kurram Tangi dam, the Munda dam, the Akhori and the Kalabagh dams suffer from faulty project planning concepts. There is an urgent need to conduct inquiries into these faulty ventures..

The storage capacity of the Kurram Tangi dam is very low and badly designed. The dam would, therefore, not control and store wet year’s flash floods and would have a short life span due to rapid silting by adopting restricted storage capacity of 0.614 maf against the required 2.0 maf approximately. The provision of small live storage capacity of 0.614 maf on the Kurram River will create water war within Bannu district between the farmers of the old and newly proposed areas.

The Munda dam is intended to control floods in the Kabul River and irrigate tens of thousands of acres of barren land. This is not true, as this is a power dam on run-of-the-river. It has live storage capacity of only 0.67 maf which would be silted within few years. An excellent site for a dam at Guroh Dop, about eight miles upstream of the Munda dam, with a storage capacity of 8.5 maf has been ignored by Wapda due to lack of any investigation.

Dr Pieter Lieftnick, head of the World Bank team, has rejected the 3.3 maf Akhori dam with a height of 250 feet due to weak foundation. Therefore, the Gariala dam superseded the Akhori dam. Despite this, the height of Akhori dam is being raised from 250 feet to 400 feet to create seven maf storage capacity on weak foundation by preparing tailored feasibility report through incompetent consultants. The PC-I of the Akhori dam has been submitted to the Ministry of Water and Power ignoring Dr Pieter Lieftnick’s report. The ministry does not have experienced dam and reservoir engineers to critically examine the feasibility reports and advise the government.

The Kalabagh dam is already controversial and is superseded by the Basha dam which too is only a replacement dam for storage, lost due to silting. A 3.5 maf raised barrage is more suitable at the Kalabagh dam site but that has been ignored for lack of investigations, though this barrage would be non-silting, long-life, and a multipurpose structure with a balancing reservoir.

Similarly, the head works of Kachi Canal were originally located on the Indus near Mithon Kot to irrigate only about 0.1 million acres. But later, Wapda abandoned the site and shifted the head works of the this canal to Taunsa barrage to irrigate 0.3 million acres. The shifting of head works of Kachi Canal to higher elevation at the Taunsa barrage to irrigate more land shows that initially proper planning, survey and investigation were not carried out to know the best Kachi Canal alignment to command maximum area of Kachi plain for irrigation.

Even now locating the head works at the Taunsa barrage is wrong, as the Kachi Canal off-take from the Taunsa barrage would only irrigate about 10 per cent of the Kachi plain of 3.5 million acres. About 90 per cent of the Kachi plain would be deprived of irrigation facilities by gravity flow. This would be a great national loss due to bad planning.

Investigation has shown that it is easily possible to irrigate the entire 3.5 million acres of the Kachi plain of Balochistan by gravity flow from the Chashma barrage as originally proposed in 1962. The preliminary feasibility report was designed to irrigate the whole of Kachi plain by the proposed All Pakistan Grand Canal fed perennially from the storage of the unique 35 maf Katzarah dam, 20km downstream of Skardu town. All the required details were provided to make a decision in this regard.

The Indus River water surface elevation at the Chashma head works is 642 feet. The barrage pond elevation would be 660 feet. The elevation of Sibi town is 440 feet. It is located on the highest tip of the Kachi plain. The Sibi town is about 416 miles from the Chashma barrage. It is, therefore, possible by gravity flow to irrigate the highest areas near Sibi town by adopting a bed slope of one in 10,000 to irrigate almost the whole of Kachi plain of about 3.5 million acres.

The discharge required to irrigate 3.5 million acres is about 14,500 cusecs, but if sprinkler and drip irrigation methods are used, about 6,000 cusecs discharge in lined canal would be enough. The Kachi Canal or the All Pakistan Grand Canal can further be extended by about 96 miles where the canal elevation would come to 390 feet. This point is some 20 miles upstream of the Kirthar branch and 28 miles upstream of Usta Mohammad. The Kachi plain would serve as the mini Indus basin on the Right Bank of the Indus River. The Kachi Canal would have an excellent patrol road, which can be connected to Karachi and Peshawar. It would be the shortest route joining one end of the country with the other.

A new area would be opened for economic development. The irrigation of about 3.5 million acres of the Kachi plain would improve the entire environment of Pakistan besides boosting the economy and bringing peace in Balochistan. An inquiry is needed at the highest technical level to know as to why the Kachi Canal was not taken off from the Chashma barrage to irrigate the whole of Kachi plain.

The above facts prove that vital mega projects for water and hydropower development costing billions of dollars are wrongly prepared due to lack of survey and investigations and by adopting wrong project planning concepts thereby destroying their optimum development potential.

The reason is that mega projects are prepared at random with very poor site investigations through inefficient retired engineers who never worked as consultants. The projects are planned as per desire of the client and their technical feasibility and economic viability is prepared accordingly. Wrong and cooked data is adopted to forcibly prove that the project is feasible.

It is surprising that no one has paid attention to provide a sound drainage system in the Indus basin after the failure of the Scarps and the NDP. An irrigation system cannot be without its vital component of drainage system. Presently, the Indus basin is invisibly destroyed by the use of 45 maf of injurious saline drainage effluent injecting about 150 million tons of injurious salts in the soil each year. About 76 per cent of the groundwater is unfit for irrigation. It is estimated that at this rate of salt injection, the Indus basin would turn a saline waste by 2030.

The vision 2016 is myopic, erratic and ineffective as it suffers from poor water project planning concepts to achieve optimum benefits. The vision 2016, four mega dams are of very low storage capacity with doubtful technical feasibility and poor economic viability. The problems of the above mentioned four mega dams and two mega drainage projects are far more serious and complicated than the ill-planned Kachi Canal now under inquiry.

Surprisingly, the unique and multipurpose 35 maf Katzarah dam at a cost of $5.5 billion is ignored because Wapda is allergic to it for having failed to conceive it and is more interested in executing the ineffective vision 2016 dams that would collectively cost about $43 billion and suffer from numerous faults as well as lack of feasibility.

Moreover, the 20 million acres of barren land in the four provinces that lie at higher elevation than the source of water cannot be irrigated to produce food as 35 maf of floodwater that goes waste to sea cannot be controlled without the mega dam at Katzarah. A cheap hydropower to lift water is not available from the mega dam. Katzarah would generate about 15,000 MW of power, control super floods, irrigate barren area of about eight to 10 million acres in the four provinces, regulate the erratic river flow and serve as carryover reservoir.

The unique benefit of Katzarah dam is that it will function as watershed management dam to prevent silt flow in the Indus water and prolong life of reservoirs on the Indus.

The source and origin of silt is on account of soil erosion in Skardu valley as its soil is one of the highly erodible soil in the world. This needs to be checked at the source by constructing Katzarah dam.

There is a dire need for an urgent inquiry to know why the Katzarah dam is being ignored from vision 2016 as it alone is equal to more than six dams of Basha size or Kalabagh size. Katzarah would increase the life of Basha dam from 80 to about 1000 years. The site of Katzarah dam was discovered in 1962 and confirmed by Dr Pieter Lieftnick in 1968.