LAHORE: A number of letters advocate small dams instead of the controversial Kalabagh Dam. It will take 900 small dams to give us an equivalent of the 3,600 megawatts of power and 6.1 million acre feet of water for irrigation that Kalabagh could provide, if built.
Even then this power and water will be of limited use only. The chairman of WAPDA is on record having said that small dams will service only the localities in which they are built. Being in remote areas and at great distances from one another, their meagre power generation will not be of much use in terms of connecting it to the national grid. Similarly, their meagre storage capacity will not be integrated to augment the flow of any major river. As to the objection of silting of large dams, Mangla and Tarbela dams have been sustaining the industry and agriculture of Pakistan for the last 44 and 38 years, respectively and have lost only a third of their capacity. With the new technique of mid-level sluicing, Kalabagh Dam, if built, could have a life of over 100 years. The Tarbela Dam is paying back its full construction cost every year and the Mangla Dam is paying back twice its construction cost every year. We are losing over $12 billion every year by not building the Kalabagh Dam.
Engr Khurshid Anwer
Published in The Express Tribune, December 21st, 2012.
