June 02, 2008	Monday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 27, 1429

JHANG, June 1: Scores of villages, comprising thousands of acres of fertile land, situated on the left bank of river Jhelum, are facing the threat of obliteration from the fast pace of erosion due to the apathy of the Irrigation department.

As many as 30 villages from Kot Khan to Saliana in the Chela and Massan qanoongo circles in Jhang tehsil are at the receiving end of this natural calamity.

The Bhorana village in the Saliana union council, which has lost three-fourth of its land to the menace, is perhaps the hardest hit among the neighbouring villages, such as, Saliana, Khutiana Bali Ahmed Khan, Kabli, Rajana, Sajhowal and Kot Khan. Most of the land of these villages has been eroded.

An upward of 100 small localities and villages had already been gulped by the rampaging river, said Muhammad Afzal Sial advocate, an affected resident of Bhorana village.

He said the process of erosion, which started in 1985, was so slow that the local population did not take it seriously.

The district nazim had allocated a sum of Rs4 million to stem the advancing river after a delegation of the affected people, led by Afzal Sial, met the nazim and apprised him of their plight.

On district nazim’s direction irrigation XENs of Trimmu, Jhang and Shah Jewna divisions along with the district forest officer held a meeting to devise a strategy to check the erosion. But the meeting decided that work on the project could not be started without the approval of the Irrigation department.

They forwarded the project file to the irrigation department in Lahore with remarks suggesting immediate launching of the project. After two months, the file was returned with the direction to conduct a survey for starting ‘tree launching’ in the affected areas.

The ‘tree launching’ is a process through which big trees are thrown into the river at the sites of erosion to thwart its further advancement.

After a three-month long survey, when the ‘tree launching’ was about to begin, another team of high ranking officials, comprising irrigation chief engineer, Sargodha; former engineer, Shah Jewna; and two experts from the irrigation ministry, Lahore, visited the site and rejected the scheme. Instead, they directed a model study of the project on the basis of a new survey.

Local engineers have their reservations about the model study because it takes years to complete and by the time it will be done the river will have eroded a major portion of Massan and Chela qanoongo circles.

Sargodha chief engineer Irfan Cheema had also disapproved the idea of the model study, but the experts from the provincial irrigation department from Lahore favoured it.

It was a hot issue during the election campaign and all the candidates tried their utmost to persuade the government to immediately start work on the project, but their pleas fell on deaf years.

The pace of erosion is so swift that if remedial measures are not taken forthwith, some 200,000 people will become homeless and their fertile land worth billions of rupees will also be devoured by the river.

Residents have appealed to the Punjab chief minister, the provincial Irrigation minister and other high-ups to take stock of the situation and direct the construction of a dyke on the left bank of river Jhelum to avert the devastation on a large scale.