I dont think anybody was expecting speech by president on water crisis.
Pakistan’s President, General Pervez Musharraf, has asked the country’s four provinces to resolve their differences over the distribution of water from the main River Indus and agree on the construction of at least two major dams.
Neither I thought Musharraf would apologized on behalf of those who are responsible for injustice acts!
What GOP needs to do is to educate people who get easily blind by so-called politicians to whom Politics is Personal-Business. The education about the future damns could be given through Local Government System.
Good to know during the speech Musharraf stays on necessity of damns with consensus of provinces.
Pakistan’s President Musharraf Speech on the issue of Water - Highlights
Pakistan’s President General Pervez Musharraf Saturday addressing the nation on radio and television said that he will only discuss the issue of water with the nation. I want to inform people about facts, he said. He said that some of political parties and people when in power support these issues but when in opposition they started to oppose these issues. The water issue was affecting badly to the country especially the people of Sindh, he said.
President Musharraf said that in Sindh drinking water was not available to people as the subsoil water is saline. Pakistan’s economic power should be preserved and poverty alleviated, he added. People should decide in favor of the poverty alleviation , he called.
Some of the people are misguiding general masses on the water issue and people should know about such betrayal, Musharraf said. Water could improve our economy and remove poverty, he said. Pakistan has agro-based economy which should be developed with the optimum use of water, he said. Development of the national water resources will benefit 70 percent people of the country, President Musharraf said.
President Musharraf said water is the future of Pakistan’s economy. We have to get decision in this respect and the nation should extend its support to the issue. Future of all provinces of the country is interdependent and we should built mutual confidence, he said. Present government did justice to all four provinces of the country in its three years tenure. Musharraf said Sindh has some complaints and he apologized if any individual or government had did injustice with any province. The government has spend 350 millions for development of barrages and other water reservoirs. The amount was spent to create an atmosphere of trust among the people, he added.
Musharraf said among the five members of the IRSA two belong to Sindh. **Punjab provided six thousand cusecs water to Sindh from its share during the water scarcity. It sacrificed for Sindh though it was also in dire need of the irrigation water. We should think 50 years in advance about water. Building of a canal needs five years while a dam requires 10 to 15 years for construction, said the President, urging for formulating a strategy in this respect. **
President General Pervez Musharraf urged for steps to provide water to the water scarcity hit areas. He urged for building of new reservoirs, new canals and lining of existing canals. He said Sindh has four objections over construction of dams and canals (1) water distribution among provinces (2) flow of water to the downstream Kotri Barrage (3) Thal Canal (4) water reservoirs. River water distribution among the provinces was being performed according to the historical average till 1991 to Punjab 51,6%, Sindh 41.4% NWFP five percent and Balochistan was given two percent share of the river water, said Musharraf. In 1991 a new agreement was signment by the Council of Common Interests decreasing 2.7 % share of Punjab, which resulted raise in share of Sindh, President said. The agreement also allows development of new water project, Musharraf said.
President Musharraf said that suspicions are being created about the Thal Canal. It is a flood water canal, he added. We should implement the strategy of building canals and water channels hand to hand. Thal is an area of poor people who are deprived of the drinking water, the water will enrich lives of thousands of these poor people and agriculture will also flourish in the area, Musharraf said.
President said the country will face an scarcity of 6.2 million water till 2013, which is equal to the capacity of a dam the scarcity should be addressed. The government has decided to uplift the Mangla Dam, which will cover scarcity of the four and half million acre feet water and it would be completed in 2007. We would have required a dam to fulfill our water needs till 2015, Musharraf urged. Meanwhile Pakistan will require another dam till 2050 when the capacity of present dams would also decreased due to silting, President further said. He urged for a decision till the next year. He asked people of NWFP who were opposing building of Kalabagh Dam to support the project for poverty alleviation. We could build dams at four sites including Kalabagh, Skardu and should decide about which project should be started first, said the President.
**Had the Tarbela and Mangla dams not been built in the 60s, about 20 million acres would have been barren by now.
Under the 1991 Water Accord, Punjab’s share was reduced by 2.7% and Sindh’s increased by 1.2%.
The Greater Thar Canal is a floodwater canal like Rainy and Katchi canals.**
This is just being emphasized in order to get peoples attention away from the LFO, but I do hope this guy succeeds in getting Kalabagh built.
Surprisingly pro Province article bY Ayaz Amir.
Having solved everything else, now water
http://www.dawn.com/weekly/ayaz/ayaz.htm
By Ayaz Amir
First the question of recognizing Israel and now the balloon of the Kalabagh Dam. Whatever else you might say of Pakistan’s man of destiny, it’s hard to deny the talent on display for raising distracting issues.
President Musharraf says that unless so many dams are built and so many canals taken out we’ll have a huge water problem by year 2050. Perhaps he’s right. Maybe we need the Kalabagh Dam, but then maybe we don’t. There’s no consensus on the issue, at least none discernible to mortal eye.
Who’s to decide? One man in his wisdom or the nation as a whole speaking through a freely-elected national assembly?
There’s nothing wrong with Musharraf personally but everything wrong with one-man wisdom. As fathers of contrived democracy go, Musharraf’s a nice person, in many respects much nicer than his three military predecessors who like him went about saving the nation. But that’s hardly the point. Being nice or personable is not qualification enough for taking decisions affecting the country’s future.
Military men have solved none of Pakistan’s problems. Indeed, any honest history will tell you, they’ve made them worse. But we’ve had a problem these past fifty years: military men not sticking to the job they were paid for. Military men itching to move outside the narrow circle of their competence and more often than not succeeding.
Now, as if other problems have been solved, we have a military-initiated debate into the pros and cons of big dams on the Indus. A fascinating subject but perhaps best discussed when the curtains fall on one-man rule and we have something closer to a democratic dispensation.
General Musharraf has enough on his plate already. He’s helping the Americans in Afghanistan, inventing ‘real’ democracy at home, nominating a prime minister and yet ensuring he remains a cipher. His own constitutional expert, he has helped re-write that much-revised document, the '73 constitution. He’s also full-time army chief, a position he seems in no hurry to relinquish.
He shouldn’t be adding water and dam-building to this heavy workload. Or doesn’t he want to leave anything to his successors?
There’s no one opinion about water in Pakistan. Punjab is in favour of the Kalabagh Dam and indeed to listen to Punjab babus you’d think the country’s future depended on it. Sindh and the Frontier think otherwise.Sindh’s case is simple. A huge dam at Kalabagh, it says, will reduce the flow of water down the Indus.
Less water flowing into the sea will starve the complex ecosystem of the Indus delta and allow the sea to come further inland thereby turning more of Sindh’s coastline into a saline desert. In other words, less water down the Indus would mean irreparable harm to a way of life and a system of agriculture in place for the last five thousand years.
Apart from angry sputtering and vague invocations to the larger national interest (the last refuge of the intellectually-beleaguered), from the babus and other enthusiasts of the Kalabagh Dam there is no cogent or convincing answer to these objections.
The Frontier’s case is different: that a dam at Kalabagh would raise the water level in the fertile, central districts of the province, thereby ruining their fertility.
And why is Punjab such a strong proponent of the dam? Because it will help irrigate the last frontier: the unwatered western districts (Bhakkar, Leiah) and the lands yet to be brought under the plough down south in Bahawalpur and Rahim Yar Khan. Who stands to gain the most when this last frontier is crossed? The Punjab oligarchy, civil and military, which from long practice has honed the art of getting the best when new farmland and new housing estates become available.
Of course, the country will benefit too. More land under the plough - regardless of who owns it, retired general or retired babu - means more grain and more wealth. But at whose cost? Sindh and the Frontier’s.
Punjab’s gain will thus be these two provinces’ loss. Which explains their virulent opposition to the project. Not because they’re less Pakistani than the Punjabis - much the same argument deployed when East Pakistan was being exploited and driven to the wall - but because in a mega-dam at Kalabagh they see ruin for the lands they have tilled since the dawn of history.
Chakwal, incidentally, stands to gain a lot from a dam at Kalabagh because the water table in all the rain-fed areas of northern Punjab - a region of which Chakwal is a part - will rise. With more water available for agriculture it’s not hard to picture this area becoming as green and productive as the irrigated lands of central and southern Punjab. But again, at whose cost?
Right from 1947, the Punjab oligarchy, with no little help from the upper-class diaspora from India, has had a great facility to put national questions in a patriotic frame. Urdu had to be the national language and not Bengali because that is what patriotism demanded. One Unit, suppressing Bengali aspirations, entering into western defence pacts and suppressing democracy itself were all justified at the bar of a higher and often mysterious patriotism.
The remnants of the old patriotism still survive in pockets of Punjab (read some of the Urdu papers to get a taste of the doctrine). Scratch any Punjab babu of a certain age and the old patriotism with all its shibboleths will quickly rise to the surface.
But the people of Pakistan as a whole, lied to so often, and by now heavily schooled in cynicism, have moved on. (Or at least one hopes they have moved on.) The old theology - responsible for the rise of militarism in the body-politic and the dismemberment of Jinnah’s Pakistan - no longer exercises the same hold.
Putting the Kalabagh Dam in a patriotic frame and indeed making its construction a touchstone of Pakistanism will no longer do. Far from doing anything good it will further embitter feelings in the smaller provinces where the word Kalabagh has become synonymous with Punjabi chauvinism.
If there is a case for Kalabagh it should be made. But by someone legitimately entitled to present the case. People should be persuaded. But again by someone entitled to do the persuading. But time is running out, says Pakistan’s soldier-president. If we don’t act now there’ll be an acute crisis of water a few years hence. All the more reason then for the soldier-president to step back a few paces and allow the Kalabagh Dam and related issues to be debated by a people’s assembly.