HYDERABAD: A large number of growers and their supporters staged a rally under the aegis of Sindh Abadgar Ittehad in Tando Mohammad Khan town on Friday as part of the ongoing protest against controversial canals project on Indus River.

The SAI president, Nawab Zubair Talpur, local grower leader Pir Ashfaq Jan Sirhindi and former MPA Mir Ali Nawaz Talpur, who led the protest, said in their speeches before the rally’s participants, when they staged a sit-in at Al Fatah chowk, that construction of canals on Indus was a matter of life and death for Sindhis.

They said that 70m peoples’ source of livelihood was directly dependent on the river and they would never allow construction of canals.

Pakistan Peoples Party was not sincere with people of Sindh over the canals project as the ruling party had not yet announced quitting the government and withdrawing its support from federal government and that was why work on the canals continued, they said.

They said that people from entire Sindh would participate in the sit-in at Baberlo bridge on the Indus staged by lawyers and political activists. The federal government should shelve the canals project, if this project was not cancelled it would lead to ouster of the government, they warned.

They said that powers that be would have to withdraw this project in the larger interest of agrarian economy of Sindh and Pakistan.

Published in Dawn, April 19th, 2025