HYDERABAD: Sindh government refuses to buy the Centre’s argument that it is no longer bound to fund the Right Bank Outfall Drain-II (RBOD) project after the passage of the 18th Amendment, and insists that the federal government is to fund the project fully under the Constitution.

The minutes of a meeting held on May 10 in Islamabad on the directives of the Supreme Court-appointed judicial commission on water quality in Sindh did not indicate that the federal government was ready to release complete funds for RBOD-II. Work on the project had been suspended a few years ago after spending Rs29 billion, according to a source in the Sindh government.

He said the Sindh government had built a strong case for ‘full federal funding’ at the meeting when the Planning Commission showed signs of dithering over funding the project in the light of a ‘new’ opinion of federal law division.

The RBOD-II was launched by the Musharraf regime in 2001 to carry effluent from upper Sindh and Balochistan down to the sea while bypassing Manchhar Lake.

Sindh secretary of irrigation Jamal Mustafa Syed had put forward arguments for full federal funding at the meeting and said that entry III of the federal list-II was clear in this respect as it spoke of the projects taken in hand by the central government before the passage of the 18th Amendment. Therefore, the Centre had to fund them accordingly, he said.

Subsequently, the federal secretary of planning Shoaib Siddiqui had briefed Justice Mohammad Iqbal Kalhoro, head of the SC commission on water quality, on May 20 in Karachi about the May 10 meeting and said the Sindh government had earlier agreed to share the cost of RBOD-II.

But, the secretary of irrigation was quick to dismiss Mr Siddiqui’s viewpoint in the presence of Chief Secretary Rizwan Memon, saying that neither he as incumbent secretary nor his predecessors had agreed to such funding because the Sindh government was clear that it was the federal government which had to release funds for the project under constitutional provision of federal list-II.

The May 10 meeting was held after Justice Kalhoro expressed his dismay over delay in the execution of RBOD-II and called for personal appearance of federal secretary of planning.

The secretary of irrigation disputed the contention put forward by the Planning Commission that the federal government was no longer bound to fund the project in question.

A source said the federal government relied on an opinion of the law division that since federal list-I or II did not talk about ‘drainage’ and ‘flood protection’ it would therefore not fund such a project.

The secretary argued that the law division’s opinion appeared to be a result of ignorance of constitutional provisions or a deliberate attempt to deny funds for the project.

He cited entry III of federal list-II under which any project which had from the day of its commencement been funded by the federal government before the passage of the 18th Amendment would continue to be a federal government responsibility.

He said that entry III made a special mention of Wapda and projects of different sectors like road, drainage etc which were to be funded by the agencies that had launched them from the day of the commencement. The RBOD-II was launched in 2001 much before the passage of the 18th Amendment, he observed.

He said that as per law division’s opinion the federal government could not make it binding on the Sindh government to pitch in Rs14bn as its share in the project.

Officers of the Planning Commission could hardly come up with a logically sound counterargument after the secretary’s presentation and Wapda was likely to review the project in view of Sindh government’s position, said sources.

A source claimed that the meeting ended on a positive note as it conceded that the Sindh government’s constitutional and technical reasoning needed to be taken into consideration by the Planning Commission and Wapda.

The Sindh government has already submitted revised project cost-I (PC-I) of RBOD-II to the federal government amounting to Rs67bn.

The Central Development Working Party (CDWP) is said to have rationalised and capped the second revised PCI-I “at Rs61.985bn including federal share of Rs48.930bn and Sindh government’s share of Rs13.055bn for flood protection component”, said the sources.

Sources in the irrigation department, however, said the revised PC-I was submitted to the Executive Committee of National Economic Council which had referred the case back to the CDWP for reconsideration.

RBOD-II would connect Main Nara Valley Drain (another name for RBOD-I) and RBOD-III in upper Sindh. The 273km-long RBOD-II starts from Deh Karampur in Sehwan taluka and has a capacity to carry 3,500 cusecs of effluent to Gharo creek in Thatta.

The federal government has been dragging its feet on releasing funds for the mega drain projects and wanted Sindh government to execute them on its own since the passage of the 18th Amendment.

Published in Dawn, June 1st, 2017