HYDERABAD, Dec 12: The Save Coast Action Committee Badin has termed the Left Bank Outfall Drain (LBOD) a manmade disaster, which has to date claimed 70 lives and caused colossal losses to crops and property, and demanded that the National Disaster Management Committee define the drain as a disastrous project.

The office-bearers of the committee, Khadim Talpur and others, told a news conference at the Hyderabad press club on Tuesday that the faults in the Rs31 billion mega project caused sea intrusion in Badin and Thatta districts, which inundated 1.5 million acres of rich agricultural land and displaced residents of more than 200 villages.

The breaches in the drain destroyed wildlife, did irreparable damages to the environment, ruined crops in eight union councils of Badin and rendered tens of thousands of people jobless, they said.

A seven-member team of World Bank visited Badin in September 2004 and heard oral testimony of at least 2,000 people of the coastal area after committee filed a petition with the bank, they claimed.

Even the World Bank had conceded in a report that the drain had caused more harm than good, they said and demanded that the bank should rehabilitate the affected areas without putting any burden on Pakistan government and waive all the money spent on this project.

The bank should not launch any other project in the coastal area unless the amount stipulated to be spent was treated as aid and not loan and the people of the area for which a new project was to be envisaged should be involved in its planning and designing, they advised.

The committee members demanded that the National Disaster Management Committee should define LBOD as a manmade disaster and also take tribal disputes as disasters because they had become perennial and cost hundreds of precious human lives without the government or society ever being able to end them.