ACCORDING to media reports, water storage capacity in the country’s reservoirs has fallen by almost 30 per cent or by five MAF owing to silting in the last five decades.
The proposed hydropower projects to be completed till 2025, will only achieve the storage capacity it has lost since the 1960s. Initially, the storage capacity in the country’s three reservoirs was 18.645 MAF but was reduced to 13.681 MAF as around 4.965 MAF was lost owing to siltation.
The installed hydropower generation capacity is 9406 MW. It is important to mention that Pakistan ranks third in the world among countries facing an acute water shortage.
Reports by the United Nations Development Programme and the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources also warn the authorities that the South Asian country will reach absolute water scarcity by 2025.
Moreover, researchers predict that Pakistan is on its way to becoming the most water-stressed country in the region by the year 2040. It is not the first time that development and research organisations have alerted Pakistani authorities about an impending crisis, which some analysts say poses a bigger threat to the country than terrorism.
Furthermore, Pakistan has incurred total direct losses of $38.053 billion from 1950 to 2015 with 50 per cent of it being incurred in the recent years, because of the shortage of dams which results in greater flooding.
The government is building a number of medium-size dams in all provinces and the government hopes that these dams will be completed on schedule. The government should set up a system to monitor the progress and to ensure that the project is completed on time.
Afia Ambreen
Rawalpindi
Published in Dawn, February 19th, 2020
