Usually this angle is overlooked by people who think dams benefit all people. They don’t. Only a select few will benefit. These are the neglected poor people of Pakistan’s villages. They have no voice in the Pakistani system, so its no wonder they feel the way they do.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/science/earth/22RIVE.html?ex=1051992734&e
A River Diverted, the Sea Rushes In
By ERIK ECKHOLM
HARO, Pakistan — Abbas Baloch gazed ruefully at a wide, shallow bay of the Arabian Sea. “This used to be our land,” he said. “And now it’s covered by the sea.”
When Mr. Baloch was born, 38 years ago, this watery expanse was at the center of his family’s estate on the Indus River delta. But after decades of dam and canal projects upstream, his farmland has largely been swallowed.
The dams and canals were built in India and other parts of Pakistan to provide irrigation and power. But little thought was given to the consequences downstream.
Here at the mouth of the Indus, the river has dried up and sea water has rushed in to replace its flows, inundating 2,000 acres of the Baloch family’s land. (The family has received no compensation, said Mr. Baloch, who is now trying to make a living in the overcrowded business of coastal fishing.)
And for millions of smaller-scale landowners, tenant farmers and river fishermen, the losses of land and the water shortages caused by water diversions upstream have been even more devastating. Many have moved to the slums of nearby Karachi; others remain in desolate villages, stunned by the sight of empty canals.
From its glacial origins in the Himalayas to its mouth at the Arabian Sea, the Indus and its tributaries support the world’s largest system of irrigation canals. The region has fertile soils but little rain. The waters of the Indus basin sustain scores of millions of people in northwest India and literally underwrite the nation of Pakistan, population 145 million and growing.
But the progressive blocking and consumption of those waters have also provided a stark example of the ecological havoc such projects can cause.
“It was just a race for the water, with no expert planning,” said Sikander Brohi, a development expert at the Center for Information and Research of the Bhutto Institute in Karachi.
When so much is squeezed from a finite resource, conflicts are inevitable. No one has fully measured the economic and environmental effects of half a century of water developments on the Indus, or shown what a different pattern of management may have achieved.
By now, the pitfalls of large dams are notorious, and donor agencies like the World Bank have become more wary, at least requiring detailed environmental and social assessments. A few decades back, the engineers were less constrained.
The largest single project on the Indus is the Tarbela Dam, in northern Pakistan, which was completed in 1976. As a report in 2000 by the World Commission on Dams put it, in damning understatement, “the ecological impacts of the dam were not considered at the inception stage as the international agencies involved in water resources development had not realized this need at that time.”
Yet in parched regions like this, the pressure for new, perhaps dubious projects remains intense. Residents of Punjab Province in central Pakistan, who have enjoyed major benefits and suffered relatively few of the damages of past projects, are pressing for another major dam. Pakistan is forging ahead with a disputed new canal in Punjab that will divert still more water to bring new desert lands under cultivation.
“A lot of the engineers and politicians consider any flow of water into the sea to be a waste, and they consider the mangrove swamps of the delta to be a wasteland,” said Mohammed Tahir Qureshi, coastal ecosystem director in Pakistan for IUCN/The World Conservation Union, a global scientific body.
The division of Indus basin waters has been a source of friction between Pakistan and India, largely but not entirely salved by an international treaty in 1960. Even more, it is a source of bitter conflict in Pakistan, with Sindh Province here in the south claiming that the more politically powerful Punjab Province of Pakistan is grabbing more than its share.
“Upstream, they are demanding more water for canals, but we are demanding water to save our coastal area,” Mr. Brohi said. “The dams are not giving proper benefit to Sindh,” he added, expressing a view that is universally held in Sindh and rejected by officials in Punjab. “When our crops need water, they are filling the dams to meet needs in Punjab.”