KARACHI: The federal government has announced an ambitious Rs125 billion Sindh barrage project on the Indus river. The conceptual study for the project has been completed by Wapda while the feasibility study would be done by September 2020. However, the civil society of Sindh has expressed serious reservations on the project. Against this backdrop, the Irtiqa Institute of Social Sciences organised a dialogue, ‘Sindh barrage: bane or boon’, to deliberate on the issue at their office here on Saturday.

Dr Altaf Siyal, a professor at the US-Pakistan Centre for Advanced Studies in Water at Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, said that the Indus Delta is the fifth biggest delta of the world. It is also a protected Ramsar site, meaning that it is a wetland designated to be of international importance under the Ramsar Convention. “Sindh alone has nine Ramsar sites along with the world’s biggest mangroves in arid zones. It is also most vulnerable to weather. The river which once had some 17 creeks, has only two active creeks or channels today,” he said.

Explaining through maps and graphs, he showed various canals the flow pattern of Indus and where the delta peeks. “The flow of water is decreasing. It is not stable. In the last 18 to 19 years, the water flow here has been less than the required environmental flow,” he said.

“But,” he said, “Wapda says that after the construction of the Sindh barrage things will improve greatly. They say there will be more drinking water, water for irrigation too and the shortage of water at the tail end will also end as the groundwater will recharge. The ecology of the river too is said to improve with foreseeable betterment for vegetation and the mangroves,” he added.

Talking of some of the features of the barrage, he said that its proposed capacity is two million acre feet (MAF) out of which 0.2 MAF is dead storage. It will have 52 gates of 50 feet width, the reservoir level is 11 above mean sea level (AMSL). There will be 165km long levees on both sides of the river (15km below Kotri barrage). The total area of the lake within the riverbed will be 485 sq km. Some 46,000 acres of forest land will come under the lake and nine thousand acres riverine agriculture land will also be submerged while one thousand houses will also be affected.

The right bank canal of 42km will see a discharge of 4,000 cusec (25,000 domestic + 600 agriculture + 900 coastal life) and a pumping unit 10MW when the level of water is below 10m. The left bank canal, a 50km channel, will see a discharge of 3,500 cusecs. “The issue here is that both canals are not perennial,” the expert pointed out. “Then 80 per cent of the delta is 6m above sea level. There is going to be water-logging, soil salinity, risk of breaches in levees, ruin of the floodplains, the river environment and ecology will change hurting palla and other fish. And the total initial cost of the Sindh barrage is estimated at 749.45 million dollars or Rs119.9 billion,” he said.

Some of the options offered to Wapda for the project by Dr Siyal included consultation with all stakeholders before going ahead with their plans, construction of a protective levee or embankment along the periphery of the tidal floodplain, making sure that the irrigation water reaches tail ends, plantation of more mangroves and reviving the relic creeks and channels.

Earlier, Nasir Ali Panhwar, an environmentalist who has worked with national and international development agencies while writing extensively on social, developmental and environmental issues, reminded that Pakistan happens to be the seventh country said to be effected by climate change. “We are already seeing unusual rain patterns here,” he pointed out.

About the Indus river, he said that it depended on glaciers and shortage of water because of climate change in the Indus has become a regular phenomena. “Due to this our ecosystem, including our vegetation especially the mangrove forests are being badly affected,” he said.

Published in Dawn, November 18th, 2019