LAHORE, May, 6: Punjab on Monday insisted that water share of the Greater Thal canal was part of the Water Accord, approved by the Council of Common Interests (CCI) and will not harm water rights of any federating unit.
In a letter to the Indus River System Authority (Irsa), it said that flood supplies would contribute only 0.624 million acre feet, whereas 1.87maf would come from permanent provincial share. For this reason alone, no one should have any objection, it claimed.
The project cost (PC-I) of the canal has also been approved by the Executive Committee of National Economic Council (ECNEC) on Feb 28, 2002 and Wapda has already executed the project.
Clarifying the provincial position, a spokesman of the Punjab Irrigation and Power department maintained that since the project could not be defeated on technical and procedural merits, opposition to it had denigrated into parochial provincial grounds. This, according to him, was unfortunate.
The NWFP came up with some an objection that water availability was based on old assessments going back to 1976-77 and 1993-94 which should be updated. The Wapda did the job and came up with new figure of 42.92maf water. The NWFP withdrew objection after the report, he revealed. But Sindh has chosen to stick to its stand that is political in nature and rather than technical. Its policy of continuously slinging mud on the project hoping that some of it would stick does not promote national cohesion. The Punjab has, and would, never object to Rainee or Kachi canals or Sehwan barrage projects despite the fact that they were based on flood supplies, he claimed.
The Water Accord itself allows new projects to all provinces provided they remain within their share from the national pool. Bring a national consensus down on self-serving grounds may be good politics taken in provincial context but was certainly a bad policy for the federation, he insisted. Sindh must come up with new projects for its own development or start executing already conceived ones rather than hampering others’.
The Punjab has never violated provincial share fixed by the Irsa and it never would. It is because it does not want to hurt the feeling of other federating units. Others must also reciprocate the gesture to foster brotherly feeling among province, he emphasised.
The Water Accord was a product of goodwill gesture and more of a memorandum of understanding. A hair-splitting approach to interpret the accord flies in the face of goodwill generated by it. The sooner it is realized, the better it would, he maintained.