Over five years after former president Asif Ali Zardari performed the groundbreaking of Ghabir Dam, farmers in the villages located along the border of Chakwal and Mianwali districts still consider the construction of the water reservoir a distant dream.

The proposed reservoir, with a storage capacity of 66,200 million acre feet of water, was to be built in the Danda Shah Bilawal village, about 95 kilometres from the Chakwal city. Upon completion, the dam would irrigate 15,000 acres of land through concrete irrigation channels. The groundbreaking was held on January 21, 2010, and the project was to be made functional by September 2014.

The dam was to be built at a cost of Rs7.35 billion. The cost was later revised to Rs9.154billion.

But five years after the groundbreaking, one finds the vast area surrounding the Ghabir River as barren as it was at the time of the then president’s visit.

“The idea to build Ghabir Dam is decades-old but the only hollow attempt to materialise it was made in January 2010 when the then president himself came for its groundbreaking,” said an official.

“Zardari’s visit had brought a ray of hope for us as ours is an arid area where the yield of crops depends upon the rains but our dream for a good yield still remains distant,” added a farmer from Dhoke Shah Hassan located on the right bank of Ghabir River.

He added that he had been hearing about the Ghabir Dam from his elders.

With the groundbreaking ceremony of the dam, Wapda deputed its employees at the site who remained there till 2014, but the construction work never began.

The federal and the provincial governments were in a fix on the issue of building the dam. First the project was assigned to Wapda by the federal government but funds were not released till 2014.

In a dramatic twist, the federal government has recently handed over the project to the Punjab government. The experts at Wapda were left stunned when their counterparts in the Punjab Small Dams Division prepared a new estimate for the construction of the dam which has been decreased to Rs5.6 billion from the Rs9.1 billion. Though the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (Ecnec) approved the revision of the project last month, funds have yet to be released.

A senior official of Wapda blamed the Planning Commission for creating hurdles in the project. “We fail to understand how would the Punjab government construct the dam at a cost of Rs5 billion,” the official added. He said the project was bound to fail.

“Wapda prepared a feasibility report with the help of international consultants. Such a big dam cannot be built with an amount of Rs5 billion,” the official added.

When contacted, Chakwal Small Dams Division Executive Engineer Syed Jalil Arshad claimed that his department would construct the dam at a cost of Rs5 billion. The work would be started soon after the release of funds, he added.

Published in Dawn, November 8th, 2015

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