ISLAMABAD, Oct 30: The federal government is likely to authorise the Army Corps of Engineers to undertake part of the Rs17 billion Revamping/Rehabilitation of Irrigation and Drainage Systems project in Sindh.

Official sources told Dawn here on Thursday that initially ‘Lining of Channels Projects’ will be handed over to the Army Corps of Engineers as the Irrigation and Power Department of Sindh is heavily occupied with the implementation of Irrigation System Rehabilitation project costing Rs12.9 billion and Right Bank Outfall Drainage-II project costing Rs14 billion.

Another reason to involve army engineers is that they have already helped the Sindh government to implement water sector projects.

However, sources said that the Sindh government has been directed by the Centre that there should be no duplication of work between “irrigation System Rehabilitation” and Lining of Channels Projects as lining of channels will automatically rehabilitate and improve the problematic cross sections of the channels.

The scope of the project includes huge quantities of earthwork for lining of 1,752 miles long channels for which a detailed environmental evaluation of the activities would also be carried out.

The lining of channels will save 1,927 cusecs of water to irrigate additional 4,45,684 acres of land and when it is converted to volume of water/year, it works out to be 1.394 MAF. This seems to be extremely high in the case of lining of 1,752 miles of minors and distributaries with less than 200 cusecs capacity.

Officials said that the lining of main canals and bigger distributaries is an expensive option and as such should not be adopted as a general government policy. It should rather be done on case to case basis considering its economics and other valid justification. Long term monitoring of lined canals should also be done to provide feedback for future policy.

The Sindh government was told that lining of channels should only be done in the areas underlain by saline water. It has been estimated that about 75 per cent of water seeped into the ground from main and secondary canals (about 18 MAF) serves as a recharge for the fresh groundwater aquifer which means about 1,10,000 tubewells are dependent on groundwater recharge from the canal system.