MUZAFFARABAD: The Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda) has claimed that it had been monitoring Safety Health & Environment (SHE) in the construction of 969-megawatt Neelum Jhelum Hydro Electric Project (NJHEP) as per 20 indicators tabulated in a daily checklist.

Based upon that, a quarterly report is formulated and regularly submitted to the AJK Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This and some other clarifications were made by a spokesperson for NJHEP in a handout on Wednesday in response to a report published in Dawn the other day.

The report was based on an official document sent by the AJK EPA to Wapda, wherein the former had declined to renew Environmental Approval for NJHEP, granted in January 2011, due to Wapda’s alleged failure to “take concrete steps for implementation of the provisions of approval.”

However, the NJHEP spokesperson asserted that the NJHEP team, consisting of Wapda, contractor and consultants, was rendering “unflagging services” to a world class underground facility which was technically a difficult assignment.

“The current overall progress of the project is 65 per cent with overall financial outlay of Rs117 billion. Quarterly reports being regularly submitted to EPA reflect these good efforts.”

According to the handout, the Environmental Monitoring Committee (EMC) for the project had been holding on site regular meetings, participated by the “available” members of the committee, representatives of Neelum Jhelum Consultants and SHE personnel of the Chinese contractor.

In each meeting, the contractor’s SHE personnel were trained and all important sites were visited for guidance of the contractor. As a result, the environmental safeguard performance had improved from 56 per cent in July 2013 to 72 per cent in June 2014, which was a healthy performance, the statement said.

It said the contractor was also regularly employing the locals except for the jobs for which skilled personnel were not available locally.

The handout said that the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report was sent to the contractor in July 2014, followed by training for understanding and implementation of Environment Management Plan (EMP) contained in the EIA.

The contractor had shown marked improvement in appropriate implementation of EMP, it claimed, adding, for any non-compliance by the contractor to the EMP provision, a self contained and well-organised system is in place.

Regarding the excavated waste soil, it said the contractor was depositing it in pre-designated landfills, generally away from riverbanks. However, wherever it was inevitable to deposit the waste soil on the bank of a river or a water body, due protection was provided to stop the waste soil from falling into the water body.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2014