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| J&K waters, Kabul waters, Skardu dam | | MEN & MATTERS | |
B L KAK
Indus Water Treaty has come to occupy an important place in the chequered history of India-Pakistan relationship. And as the treaty cannot be scrapped unilaterally, noises over the sharing of waters by the two countries will continue. Pakistan's water worries cannot and should not escape India's attention.
Pakistan has no storage sites on the Chenab and only one site on the Jhelum, at Mangla just within Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK). It has lost 30 per cent of overall storage capacity at Mangla, Tarbela and Chasma (the latter two on the Indus) on account of sedimentation. It is raising Mangla by 30 feet to store an additional 2.9 MAF and is desperately looking for other sites on the Indus.
Kalabagh, below Tarbela, marks the lowest possible storage site (6.1 MAF, 3600 MW). But this dam is strongly opposed by NWFP and Sind. The Pakistan government has approved the Basha-Diamer dam, near Chilas in the Northern Areas, 200 km upstream of Tarbela (7.34 MAF, 4500 MW, 6.7 billion dollars as of 2002). NWFP supports Basha but Pakistan feels that Basha and Kalabagh should go together and can be completed by 2011-2014.
Both India and Pakistan share the Indus and it is only if they join hands that its potential can be optimised with sustainability to combat the common peril of climate change. Three separate reports by parliamentary, technical and international expert committees set out Pakistan’s water future. Sharp inter-provincial differences, largely revolving around Pakistani Punjab’s dominance, and the need to accommodate Afghanistan's demands on the Kabul River have shaped the discourse.
Pakistan currently diverts 117.35 MAF from the Indus, two thirds of this during the kharif season. Another 8 MAF is used for drinking, sanitation and industrial purposes. A further average daily flow of 5000 cusecs (10 MAF) is required to escape to the sea below the Kotri barrage for the purpose of fisheries, coastal and delta management, preservation of mangroves and to prevent saltwater intrusion. The entire 33 MAF flow of the three eastern rivers has been allocated to India under the Indus Treaty, but apart from regenerated supplies, about 3 MAF still flows into Pakistan. Additionally, while India is entitled to irrigate 1.34 million acres of land in Jammu and Kashmir from the three western rivers, it has still to irrigate some 0.52 million acres and Pakistan estimates it will never use more than 2 MAF under this entitlement.
Currently Pakistan reportedly uses almost 90-95 percent of Kabul waters. However, Afghanistan has started on the road to development and has arid areas to irrigate. A UNESCO-Iran study on possible Afghan uses is under way; but Pakistan believes that this requirement will not exceed 0.50 MAF.
The Basha-Diamer project entails widening and upgrading the Karakoram highway from Manshera to Chilas, itself a considerable undertaking. A 905-foot high dam appears problematic to some who advocate phased construction, going up to 600 feet in the first instance. Basha lies beyond the arc of the monsoon and will therefore be entirely snow-fed like the proposed mega Katzarah dam (35,000 MAF, 15,000 MW), near Skardu, or the more modest Skardu dam alternative (8000-15,000 MAF, 4000 MW). The two latter dams would require even more elaborate highway improvements over a longer lead and entail high transmission costs over a bleak landscape to distant load centres.
All three dams, and even the Kalabagh dam, would only fill in years of high flood, being essentially carryover dams to hold such “surplus storage”. The Katzarah dam would submerge much of the Skardu bowl, the best of Balti civilisation and Pakistan’s strategic communications. It has accordingly attracted considerable opposition even at the conceptual stage. Nevertheless, A N G Abbas, Chairman of the Technical Committee on Water Resources, continues to champion it, along with Sind, as Pakistan’s carryover solution to wide annual flow variations, capturing 84 per cent of the available “storable surplus” in the system. He believes that a detailed project will be ready by 2009; work can commence by 2015 and be completed in eight years.
However, a consultancy study for the World Bank by Wallingford of the UK, suggests that climate change and glacier melt could reduce Indus flows at Skardu by as much as 30 per cent within the next 30-40 years. Cooperation with India in developing an Indus-II on the foundations of the 1960 Indus Water Treaty would probably yield Pakistan better and surer dividends, at less cost and sooner.
According to some experts, India too would stand to benefit as it could then jointly survey sites with Pakistan for potential storages on the upper Indus in Ladakh and investigate the possibility of building or augmenting storages on the Chenab and Jhelum that are currently barred by the Indus Water Treaty beyond stipulated limits. The surplus waters of the Ravi and the other two Eastern Rivers that India cannot utilise could perhaps also be harnessed through joint cooperation, which could extend to developing the potential of the Indus system in the Northern Areas and PoK, on Pakistan’s side of the Line of Control (LoC).
Exploration of this idea, whose time has come, could add a most useful and creative dimension to the current Indo-Pakistan peace process in J&K, covering land use, sediment control, agriculture, forestry, hydro energy, transmission and eco-tourism on both sides. This would make the J&K border “irrelevant”, help build transborder institutions across it and yield a huge peace dividend with manifold benefits to all the people of J&K.
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