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| Pak rejects India's objections | | Work on Bhasha-Diamer dam won't stop: Musharraf | | From B L KAK
NEW DELHI, July 11: Islamabad has no plans to stop work on the construction of the 6.5 billion dollar Bhasha-Diamer dam in the northern teritory of Pakistan.
If there was any doubt about it, it was set at rest by the Pakistan President, Gen. Parvez Musharraf, himself. That he has ignored New Delhi's insitence on the need to honour the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) is borne out by his public pronouncement: Work once started won't be allowed to be stopped. The Bhasha dam will have to be completed.
The project is designed to generate 4,500 MW of electricity and store 7.3 million acre feet of water. The dam is being built on the Indus river, about 40 km west of the town of Chilas in the mountainous region and 210 km north of capital Islamabad. It will preserve 15 per cent of annual flow of the river Indus.
After performing the ground-breaking ceremony, Gen. Musharraf has made it clear that all other planned dams, including the controversial Kalabagh, would be built under his "2016 Water Vision" to meet Pakistan's growing water and energy requirements. "Water and energy are matters of life and death for us. We have to build all dams," he has declared.
India had voiced its concern over the building of the dam in a region that formerly was part of the Jammu and Kashmir State, but Islamabad rejected the Indian stance. In fact, Gen. Musharraf has let it be known that the planned Kalabagh, Akori, Munda and Kuram Tangi dams would be built by the year 2016.
He said that other countries were building dozens of dams every year and blamed the past leadership for lacking a vision and interest to construct big water reservoirs for meeting future requirements.
Earlier this year Gen. Musharraf was compelled to put the Kalabagh project on the back burner after strong protests from southern Sindh province and the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). Gen. Musharraf's pronouncements in support of the construction work on the dam in Pakistan's northern teritory have, signifcantly, come at a time when Islamabad just does not want India to build hydropower generating projects in Jammu and Kashmir on the ground that they violated the Indus Water Treaty.
"We need water to develop our agriculture while cheap energy is needed for industrial development," the Pak President said. "I will not let Pakistan commit suicide because of water and energy shortage," he declared, refusing to take note of objections from Indian authorites |
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