Dam difficulties

The chronic failure to coordinate, curses any number of developments vital to the national economy.

The energy crisis in Pakistan touches everybody. The causes of the problem are many and complex, but a major factor has been the failure by successive governments to build a power generation infrastructure that not only meets current needs but looks to the future as well. Building dams to generate hydropower is a cost-effective and durable solution, but building dams in Pakistan is fraught with difficulty and contention, with the Diamer-Bhasha Dam in trouble before it has even generated a single volt of power. Construction on the project that will produce 4,500MW on completion is about to begin, but a background of unresolved issues are likely to hinder the work. The revenue sharing mechanism with the federal government has yet to be established and there is a festering boundary dispute between Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The value of compensation for those displaced by the lake that will form was fixed in 2009 — and land values have increased substantially in the years since, leaving those to be compensated considerably out of pocket and aggrieved. All current impediments are interlinked and there is no single solution that will fix them.

In terms of priority, the boundary dispute probably heads the list, closely followed by compensation to the 4,228 households that will be affected. Revenue matters are unlikely to have a ‘quick fix’ and it is vital to the national interest that work starts on the dam and proceeds at all speed.

There is going to be an environmental impact, there always is when a dam is built anywhere, but some of the wilder predictions — such as Gilgit being beset by perpetual rains and storms — are largely discounted. What is evident is that there was a poverty of joined-up thinking from the outset of the project and a failure to have all the stakeholders in the loop. That chronic failure to coordinate, curses any number of developments vital to the national economy. Pakistan cannot grow without power and some joined-up problem-solving is essential if the Diamer-Bhasha Dam is ever to generate any.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 8^th, 2014.

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